


Cuts Both Ways

by slipsthrufingers



Category: Nikita (TV 2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-23
Updated: 2012-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-30 00:30:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/325796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipsthrufingers/pseuds/slipsthrufingers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He leaves Division in the dead of night. He says no goodbyes, he lets no one know that anything might be amiss." -- Michael discovers the truth about his family's death first and goes rogue well before Nikita meets Daniel.</p>
<p>It's revenge with a twist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Blood and Bruises

_My only faith is in the blood and bruises I display._

He leaves Division in the dead of night. He says no goodbyes, he lets no one know that anything might be amiss. He knows it won’t last long, but any advantage is worth its weight in gold when dealing with his former employer, especially when you know how to exploit it like he does.

Michael takes the first flight to Hawaii, travelling under an alias, with impeccable fake identification and a new haircut to match the photos. Again, it won’t fool them for long, once they realise he’s missing. But it’ll stall them for a bit. Most likely they’ll assume he’s gone to ground somewhere on the mainland.

And all right-- He should’ve. Air travel is risky. Ever since 9/11, there are too many cameras around, too much security, he can’t hide from all of it, and it’ll be harder to escape under the nose of all these guards and police and, _shit_ , the military guards who’re no doubt hiding behind the scenes.

But he arrives at the house. It’s not the same one that he picked out all those years ago; he finds out later that that one was demolished and replaced with some timeshare condos. It doesn’t really matter though. The salty sea-breeze that whistles through the two bedroom hut he hires for cash is enough. He sees his daughter sleeping soundly in the smaller of the rooms. He sees his wife curled up in the rocking chair on the small wooden deck.

He sees the future he could’ve had. He sees the future that Kasim and Percy and Division took away from him.

He knows what he has to do.

He has to take down Division.

… … …

Nikita doesn’t think she’s ever seen Division this disorganised. Michael is gone. It took them two days to realise he has dropped off the face of the earth and disappeared. Birkhoff can’t find him. Amanda doesn’t know anything and is on a rampage because Percy clearly _does_ know something, but isn’t letting the rest of them in on whatever it is. Instead, he has just barked short commands to find Michael “yesterday” and retreats to his locked office to scheme or plot or whatever it is he does.

Nikita is lost.

She flits between the departments, helping where she can. Birkhoff is tracking the past, where Michael went, what Michael did, but he’s good at disappearing. They know he spent a day in Hawaii, but went off the grid shortly after, with a good chunk of cash in his pocket.  
Amanda has mocked up a psych profile and is trying to predict where he’ll go next. Theories are produced and she speculates on his motivations, but they are lacking in any solid answers for the same reason Birkhoff’s traces go nowhere... they don’t know why Michael ran.

On day three, Percy calls a meeting. High level management only, but Nikita finds herself invited along as well.

Percy stands at the front of the room and explains everything: “Six years ago, we had a Division agent in deep cover with Al Qaida defect, his name is Kasim Tariq. He cemented his position within the group by targeting a naval base in Yemen. Michael was assigned there before he joined us and his wife and daughter were killed in the car bomb that Tariq set off.”

Percy pauses in his story to display a recent picture of Tariq on the electronic display behind him, along with the standard bio specs Division provids for any target.

“Division disavowed any ties to Tariq immediately, and soon after Michael was recruited into our ranks, though considering his psychological state at the time and the, uh, embarrassing nature of Tariq’s defection, we decided to keep Tariq’s previous Division ties from Michael in order to keep the peace.

“It seems that Michael has discovered this fact and has misconstrued events. I believe he’s under the impression that Division was behind the death of his family, thus his rather hasty exodus from us. It’s imperative we find him and debrief him as soon as possible. Nikita, I am putting you in charge of the manhunt. Birkhoff and Amanda will assist you from communications, but you will be the leader on the ground.”

“Yes sir.” Nikita nods obediently.

“The sooner we find him, the better. Dismissed.”

… … …

He settles for a while in a hunting cabin in North Dakota. Off the grid in every way, no internet connection, no telephone line. He needs to travel along unsealed roads 30 miles to the south before he gets to the closest town and a single bar of cell phone reception.

The cabin itself is bare bones, and clearly hasn’t been used in a few decades before Michael moved in. He spends the first few weeks performing necessary repairs as quickly as possible so that he’ll be able to live here throughout the coming winter. It’s hard work, but he relishes it. Patching the roof and floors, repairing the cracked plumbing pipes and the ancient gas-powered water heater; every night he collapses into bed exhausted from the work, so exhausted he doesn’t even dream.

So it takes a few months, well into the hard winter before the nightmares come, and by that stage he’s snowed in, and trapped with nothing but his bitter memories to torment him and the ghost of his family to haunt him.

He hears Hayley’s infectious laugh in the next room, smells Elizabeth’s perfume on his pillow when he wakes in the morning. He goes entire days without being able to shake the feeling that they’re just behind him, watching him, judging him, hating him, for not discovering the truth sooner, for not doing anything about it now he knows. It takes everything he can to keep from storming back into Division, guns a-blazing, fully prepared to take down every single person who gets in between him and killing Percy. But he knows that he has to wait. Taking down Percy is a bigger task than simply killing the man-- if he goes, someone else, some other unknown potentially worse entity will fill the void, and more innocent people will die.

No. This is the long-haul.

So when Hayley whispers in his ear asking him to read her a bedtime story, he drowns her out by picking at the holes in Division’s armour, and when Elizabeth caresses his cheek after he shaves, he takes comfort in imagining how he’ll push the knife between Division’s ribs.

When the snow begins to thaw, and the trees begin to show signs of life again, he packs up his cabin. He has a war to start.

… … …

When she reads the new assignment Percy gives her, she’s surprised to say the least. It’s a cushy one, a long-term undercover op, recon, no wet work, working at an IT company that has contracts with the defence department, and she’ll even have support for the technical stuff-- Birkhoff will be doing the bulk of the work once she hard-wires them into the system, but when he plugs the holes and uncovers the moles she’ll be the one that takes the credit.

It’s not exactly a job they give an operative who’s botched the only important mission she’s ever been in charge of.

She leaves her shiny new apartment, which has been styled perfectly by Division with that 'lived-in' look, with half-full bottles of toiletries and a moth trap in the closet (complete with long-deceased moths) to get a breath of fresh air and to give herself a bit of time to decompress away from Division's eye-- for all Amanda's talk about independence on this mission, Nikita knows the apartment will be tapped.

Nikita walks a few blocks, hands shoved deep into the pockets of her new persona's grey winter coat and when she sees a cozy looking cocktail bar she slips inside, partially to get out of the cold, but mostly because she needs a stiff drink. She hates the feeling of complete uselessness not finding Michael has left her with and although she knows that drinking away her sorrows is a bad idea, she needs to take the edge off before she cracks.

The bar is called _Canvas_ and is dimly lit, and has a charming rustic aesthetic to it, but it doesn't seem to be a particularly busy night. A few couples are scattered at little tables and benches near the front, but Nikita chooses a seat at the bar.

She peruses the cocktail menu for a little bit, before settling on one simple glass of Merlot, which she lets mull for a moment before she takes a sip. It isn't ketamine, but it does warm her throat as it goes down-- better than nothing.

"Penny for your thoughts?" A man asks her kindly from his seat, a few bar stools down from her own.

"They're hardly worth that much." She says with a sad smile, sending a glance his way. He's handsome, dark hair, cleanly shaven, and has bright, happy eyes.

"Now, don't sell yourself short." He says, "I'm sure there's something in there worth a penny or two."

She takes another sip of her wine. “Well that’s nice of you to say,”

He smiles, picks up his beer and shifts across two seats until he’s on the bar stool directly next to her. “I hope you don’t mind, but can I ask you something?”

Nikita looks him up and down, but can’t bring herself to be suspicious. She’s so tired, and there is nothing about this man that is setting off any warnings, and even if she is wrong, she can look after herself. “Sure.” She says.

“Are you all right?” He asks, and it startles her. He must notice, because a tiny frown appears between his eyebrows, and he says: “I don’t mean anything by it. It’s just you look sad, or tired, but in that world-weary way. Sometimes it’s good to talk to someone about your problems who has no preconceptions about you... or your problems.”

“Are you offering to be my shrink for the night?” She laughs a little, because it is definitely not the pickup line she expected.

“Only if you want. I promise there’s no catch.” He holds his hands up in surrender. “But if you want to talk, I’ll pay for that drink, and we can talk about whatever you want.”

She swills her glass around and takes a sip. “What the hell, sure. Though to protect the innocent--” (the guilty) “-- I’ll just explain it hypothetically, is that fine?”

“Of course.”

“I’m starting a new job soon that I don’t think I’m qualified for. In fact, my last job ended badly, I wasn’t fired, but it led to a big loss for my company and instead of being fired they’ve transferred me... I’m just drowning my doubts in over-priced wine.” She holds up her glass.

The man nods, “It sounds like you’ve been given a second chance, though, with this new job.”

“It’s hard, though. I feel like my mistakes are hovering over me like a cloud I can’t escape from.”

“Yeah, it sucks. Self-doubt.” He gently nudges her shoulder, it’s innocent, with a tiny hint of flirty, but just enough to spark something warm and tingly in her belly that isn’t from the wine. “You need to figure out what your umbrella is, then, to help protect yourself from them.”

“I like how you ran with my metaphor there.”

He chuckles, “Yeah, I thought it was pretty clever.”

“So what’s my umbrella?” She asks.

“Well I don’t know you, so I can’t help you there, but I’m sure you have something on your side, or else you’d still be looking for work.”

“I’ll have to have a think about that.” Nikita says and glances at the thin watch on her wrist. The time has definitely gotten away from her, and she does have an early start tomorrow morning. She finishes off the last of the Merlot.

“I have to go, but you were right, it is good to get it off my chest.” She says, and holds her hand out, “Nice to meet you, I’m Nikita.”

He shakes it, it’s a nice firm grip, sold and reassuring. “I’m Daniel, and hey, if you ever want to talk about anything...”

He reaches across the bar and grabs a napkin from a neatly stacked pile, and with a pen from his shirt pocket he jots down a cell phone number.

“Give me a call.”

“I will.”

… … …

 

He is fighting a ghost, he realises that now, and it is hard not to be frustrated at his lack of progress. He uses his knowledge of procedures and protocol and the personnel to profile probable missions. News reports of innocuous deaths, some important, some not, become his bread and butter. He reads the obituaries and compares the details found there to the ones found in the official death reports, and then he investigates those. It’s a lot of dead ends for a lot of boring work, and by the time he finds a lead on something Division is doing, they are long gone, and the trail has gone cold.

Picking up patterns was never his strong suit, that was something better left to Birkhoff or NIkita, both of whom had more natural talent in that area. So after a few months, when his first idea of following the breadcrumbs that Division leaves behind fails, he decides to try a different tack.

He starts picking out potential Division targets, particularly the ones that Percy was becoming more and more fond of-- the work for hire jobs. They vary in their flavour, sometimes it’s straight-forward assassination work, sometimes it’s corporate espionage. The only thing they have in common is that Percy has had great success lining his pockets with the spoils of their work.

Michael sets up his base camp in an abandoned building, mansion, really, right in the centre of Manhattan. It has at least five escape routes, it's private, and after greasing the palms of a few out-of-work techies he found milling around the local Apple store, it has a solid optic fibre security system and triple-firewalled internet connection that would at least make Birkhoff pause for a few seconds before plowing on through.

It doesn't really matter though, he sets up a few programs to run searches daily looking for any new story or article or _anything_ that fits the parameters he sets up. If anything blips, he can follow the trail from there. He knows he'll still miss more than he hits, but it feels good to have something logical on his side, something impartial and mathematical.

The rest of the time he spends cultivating his contacts-- stocking up on weapons, acquiring his funds, setting up aliases and other safe houses so that if Division catches up to him (He isn't naive enough to think they would've stopped looking for him unless they had his body on a slab in the morgue, so he's taking no chances) he'll have somewhere to bug out to.

He has his arsenal at the ready and a few allies up his sleeve when he finally gets a viable lead-- a few suspicious leaks come from a big security contractor and one of them is noticed by his tracer programs. He packs his bags with the supplies he thinks he’ll need, and books a ticket to Washington DC, after months and months of waiting, it all happens so quickly, he doesn’t really have a chance to process anything until he’s in the car and on the road.

It’s an irrational feeling to have, but after months of dead ends and failed leads, something feels good about this one.

… … …

“Describe your feelings,” Amanda says, pouring out a fresh pot of green tea into her dainty china cups. “Being back here, it’s been two months.”

“Has it been that long?” Nikita asks, taking the cup with a smile. She takes a small sip from the side then places it back down on the table in front of her.

“Well, extended cover has been treating you well, you look lovely!”

Nikita blushes a little, still uncomfortable receiving comments on her appearance, especially from Amanda, who is always so well put together, “Thanks.” She says, sitting straight in her chair. “Can’t say I miss the pyjamas though,”

There is a long pause as Amanda smiles at the joke and takes a sip of her own tea. Suddenly Nikita feels nervous, though she is careful not to let it show on her face. She knows this evaluation is a tricky one, that she’ll be asked about her relationship with Daniel, which has begun to blossom from a friendship into a tentative romance. It’s the first time in a long while she’s had something to herself, outside of Division, and she wants to keep it that way as much as she can.

“Tell me about him.” Amanda says, but Nikita is prepared.

“He’s nobody, he’s just a guy.” She says, a little dismissively.

“What’s his name?”

“Daniel. Daniel Munroe.”

“And he’s your lover?” Amanda says it with such a straight face that Nikita cannot help the smile that creeps upon her. It’s such a perfunctory, ridiculous phrase, especially coming from Amanda.

“My lover? Is this the 30s?”

Amanda smiles as well, and amends her phrasing: “Your boyfriend?”

“Amanda, he’s... “ She pauses a little, and searches for a way to explain it in a way that will be acceptable to Division. It’s not as if she’s doing anything wrong by forming a relationship with an outsider, but she doesn’t want to give them an excuse to pry any further. “Look, I know what you’re getting at, boyfriend, or whatever you want to call it. It’s just part of the cover. Nobody would believe the girl we created is single, and what you need to understand is that everything I do is in service to Division.”

She can see from the look on Amanda’s face that she’s said the right thing, and that she has satisfied the older woman with her explanation, so she takes another sip of her tea. The bitter liquid rolls down the back of her throat and warms her on the way down.

"Well, it seems you have everything under control there, Nikita." Amanda says, "You know that if you ever have any need to talk about anything, I'm here and our chats are completely confidential."

Nikita nods.

"So let's talk about Michael."

The cup wobbles a little in her hand at the sudden shift in topics, but Nikita does her best to cover it by bringing her other hand up to hold the other side, as though trying to warm her fingers against the ceramic. She has spent so long pushing Michael and that failure to the back of her mind, that it completely slipped her mind that Amanda would probably bring it up in this evaluation. Nikita mentally berates herself, but maintains a neutral face and does drop eye contact with Amanda.

"What about him?" Nikita asks evenly.

"Well, it's been over a year since he left us, and our efforts to find him notwithstanding, you two were quite close. I'm sure you have some unresolved feelings on the issue."

"No, not really." She lies, and knows immediately by the skeptical expression on Amanda's face that it was not convincing enough.

"Nikita," Amanda says quietly. "I'm not here to pass judgement, you know that."

Nikita doesn't believe that for a second, but knows that she will need to give more ground, now that she has been caught out. "I feel angry at myself, that I couldn't find him." Nikita says, and it is the truth, even if her reasons for being angry are less at failing Percy's orders and more about failing her friend when he no doubt needed one.

"Go on," Amanda says.

"I was... hurt, I suppose, that he didn't say goodbye before he left. I know why he didn't-- if I truly believed Division was responsible for killing my family, I wouldn't stick around to say goodbye either, but I trusted him so much, I thought it went both ways."

"You think you valued his friendship more than he valued yours?"

"No." She shakes her head. "No, more that I misjudged it. I've thought about it a lot. He was my mentor, my teacher. There was always going to be that space between us... And I think I want to help him more as a thank you for all the help he gave me."

"That's very noble of you. Though I think you do yourself an injustice. I've worked along side Michael for a long time, and I've never seen him take as much interest in a recruit as he did with you."

Nikita isn't sure what to make of that, so she finishes her tea instead of responding.

… … …

The security system in the apartment is easily bypassed and the locks picked with his skeleton key. He’s here purely for reconnaissance, he’s been watching this man for weeks now, convinced that Division has him under watch, though Michael still isn’t sure why. He’s a nobody, a moderately successful graphic designer named Daniel Munroe. His company has never done work for anyone who might have secrets to sell, instead they mostly work for non-profit charities, conquering cancer, homelessness, the like.

And yet despite all that, he finds a Division issued bug hidden under a Moroccan lamp in the living room. He’s not worried about Division finding him here-- he has a signal jammer in his pocket, but his curiosity is definitely piqued.

He rustles through the mail on the hallstand, looking for something, anything that’d clue him in on why this guy is of interest to Division, but all he finds are bills and a week old subscription issue of Newsweek. There is a box of tampons in the bathroom cupboard and some racy women’s underwear in a drawer in his closet, but no photos of the girl in question. There is a postcard of ducks swimming in the lake in central park affixed to the fridge which is signed with a heart and the letter 'N'. In his weeks watching over this guy he hasn’t seen the girlfriend once, though he overheard Daniel mentioning to a colleague that “Nic is out of town on business”, but he does find it strange that there isn’t more evidence of her here.

“What do they want with you?” He says to the man standing with his parents in a graduation gown, garishly blue in that 90s sort of way, as if asking it out loud will give him the answers he needs.

He's after leverage, and this guy seems like a bit of a dead end. Sure, he might be a target, but there is nothing here that makes Michael think 'Division', so he has to assume that this guy is a means to an end, or is under surveillance for another reason. Maybe they're setting him up to be a patsy for something and are readying to plant the evidence. Maybe he's an expert on something Division needs. Maybe he's in witness relocation and he was an arms dealer in a past life. Whatever it is, Michael has no idea.

But he does hear the soft click of the front door opening, and _shit_ , he thought Daniel was working late. He silently pushes back into the open closet, burying himself amongst the suits and polo shirts hanging neatly pressed. His mind whirls through his options at a rapid pace, he could fight the man, pretend to be a simple burglar who got caught in the act and panic, he could take the man out, and ruin Division's chances of using him for whatever evil purpose they intend. Or he could step out and under the protection of his signal jammer, explain everything to him, help him get out from Division's net, maybe get to him to his girlfriend and out of the country where they can have a better life together. Something that he never had the chance to do with Elizabeth...

Michael hears the man moving about the living room, switching on the light and the television, and he hears an episode of _The Simpsons_ has just started. He's still hidden, but not for long, and if he's going to help this guy out he needs to step out now and reveal himself.

He steps out of the closet, gun out but safety on, ready to confront Daniel, but a tell-tale 'click' of a gun being cocked has his him reacting on pure instinct, jumping behind the bed just as a blond man dressed in black starts shooting.

The man definitely isn't Daniel Munroe, Michael recognises him as Owen, a Cleaner, and he flinches as the mattress beside him explodes in springs and fluff and feathers as another bullet barely misses his shoulder. Michael switches the safety off and fires a few shots back at the Cleaner, enough so that he has to duck out of the room and take cover behind the door-way, giving Michael a few more seconds to assess the situation.

He identifies his assets (he has his gun, and a spare clip, his cell phone, his signal jammer--though clearly it's faulty-- and a knife in his boot) and his exit points (through Owen to the front door, through the window in the bedroom, with a four floor drop to the ground, or the window in the living room out onto the fire exit), he chooses his route and acts before Owen has a chance to counter him.

Michael fires off two more shots, then vaults over the bed to the bedroom door. When Owen points his gun around the door frame Michael quickly disarms him, snatching the gun from Owen's grip with a twist of his wrist and once it’s in his hands he fires a quick two shots back at the cleaner, winging him in the shoulder.

The Cleaner barely flinches at the pain, but Michael now has both the guns and the upper hand, and he's only a few steps away from the front door. Owen aims a punch at his jaw with his good hand, but Michael blocks it smoothly before aiming a sharp jab to the wound on the cleaner's side, followed quickly by a kick to the solar plexus. Owen curls into himself, winded and in pain, and Michael takes his chance, pushing the Cleaner over the couch to their side, and bolting for the front door. He knows he should finish the cleaner off before he leaves-- but there is nothing right about this situation and he knows it's best to get out of here as quickly as possible.

He doesn't stop running until he's three blocks away and is sure no one is following him. He dumps the cell phone and the signal jammer into a dumpster, and pulls both the guns apart, dropping the individual pieces down storm-water drains, sewers, trash cans, before shoving his hands into his pockets before bugging out to one of his safe houses, well away from DC, Owen, Daniel Munroe and anything Division could use to track him down.

A few days later, another report appears in the paper: _A local DC man has been found dead in his apartment, an alleged victim of a burglary gone wrong. Police report that Daniel Munroe, a graphic designer, was found by his fiance dead on Tuesday morning, of a gunshot wound to the head._

... ... ...

“Nikki.” Birkhoff says quietly, a gentle hand on her shoulder, pulling her back into reluctant wakefulness. “Nikki, wake up. We have news.”

She blinks a few times, and feels completely disoriented, and more than a little woozy. With each blink, the room becomes a little clearer, and the concerned expression on Seymour’s face swims into focus.

She tries to push herself back into a sitting position, but she sways a bit, and it’s only Seymour’s hand that grabs her shoulder and holds her steady. A scratchy wool blanket falls off her lap to the floor. How did she get like this? She pushes through the fog in her brain to remember.

And then it all comes back to her.

_Daniel._ Finding him dead. _So much blood_. Panicking. Someone had pushed a needle into her arm, and then it’d all gone dark.

“Why did you drug me?” She says accusingly, hating the all-too-familiar lethargy of sedatives, hating that these people, who tried so hard to get her off them had put them straight back in her system.

“You were having a panic attack.” Birkhoff says, almost whispering. They’re in his private study, and she’s on his couch. She’s napped here many a time, when she needed a few minutes shut eye and didn’t want to use an old recruit’s quarters. “Amanda did it for your own good.”

The woman in question appears behind him, though she hasn’t spoken a word, choosing simply to observe the two of them.

“We have some news.” Birkhoff repeats, “About Daniel.”

Nikita searches his eyes for what it is, and he passes her a tablet. “Percy told me to find the guy who did this, so I hacked the building’s security cameras, to see if we could track the guy down, maybe use facial recognition or something, and well...”

He touches the screen and grainy black and white security footage begins to play. The timestamp in the corner tells her it’s from about 10pm last night, and figure dressed in black walks down the first hallway and into the elevator, face hidden from the camera. The camera angle switches to the elevator footage, and the man glances up and gives her a good view of his face.

It’s Michael.

“What is this?” She asks dumbly, positive that she’s still confused and fighting off the drugs from her system.

“About 20 minutes later, Daniel comes home. And then ten minutes after that--” Birkhoff swipes at the screen with a finger, and the footage changes to Michael running through the hallway, gun clearly held in his hand, and an unmistakable splatter of blood on his cheek “-- we found this.”

“Our forensic unit also found his DNA at the scene.” Amanda adds.

“Are you saying Michael did this?” She asks.

“Yeah, Nikki.”

“Michael killed Daniel?”

Amanda nods, and Birkhoff looks grim. “Yes.”

She shoves the tablet back at Birkhoff and pushes herself unsteadily up on her feet. She wobbles, but bats his hand away when he reaches out to hold her.

“I’m going to be sick.”


	2. Revenge is a kiss

_Revenge is a kiss and this time I won’t miss_

 

He spends months tracking her down and finally finds her on the streets. She’s strung out on heroin and barely conscious when he roughly grabs her, knocks her out and shoves her into the back of his car. She is dangerously underweight, he feels it when he picks her up and carries her into his safe house, but by the time she’s come down from the high and woken up, you’d be hard pressed to believe that she’s only barely this side of 90 pounds, what with the way she’s pounding on the doors of his sauna. 

“Let me out, you sicko!” She cries, hammering her fists on the doors so hard he’s genuinely concerned she’ll break a bone in her hand.

“Calm down.” He says sharply. “I’m not trying to hurt you.”

“You’re BOILING ME ALIVE!” She yells, and he can hear her hyperventilating through the glass and the door. He presses a hand to the door, willing her to be calm, and to bring her breathing back to normal.

“I’m not.” He shakes his head so that she can see. “This is a detox. We need to get the drugs out of your system.”

“WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?” She screams at him, and spittle flecks hit the window.

“My name is Michael. And you need to stay calm or you’ll hurt yourself. This will be over soon, I promise.” And he walks away, back to his work station. The girl is young, and she’s been through a lot, only some of which he’s been able to discover.

Little Alexandra Udinov has fallen so low, but she’s still alive, and that is more than she should be. She should have died in a mansion in Russia three years ago. She _had_ died in a mansion in Russia three years ago, and yet here she is, in his sauna, out of her mind on drugs, but alive.

At the time he’d suspected something wasn’t right, Nikita had been cagey after the mission, and at the time he’d written it off as post-mission nerves, and there were certain discrepancies at the scene afterwards that he’d brushed off as coincidence, but now here he has his answer. Nikita had saved this girl, who’d somehow survived the next few years, and had made it to America.

He can’t help but see it as a small sign of hope, that someone else had their doubts about Division. Nikita had always been an exemplary agent, following orders to the letter. Or at least that’s how it seemed to him, from his position as her handler. Sure, sometimes her methods were a little unpredictable, but it was always to her (and the mission’s) favour. So for her to have done this? It’s important.

So he is happy enough persisting with the rehabilitation of this poor, lost girl. He checks back up on her a few hours later and finds her sleeping (more likely passed out) in the corner. She smells atrocious, sickly sweet and covered in sticky sweat, but he lifts her out of the box with ease and cradles her small, frail body to himself. He lays her gently down on the bed he set up for her in the corner and covers her with a sheet. He checks the bowl is still next to the bed, and a fresh glass of water is ready on the beside table for when she wakes.

… … …

Amanda calls it tunnel vision. Birkhoff calls it her obsession. Percy doesn’t call it anything, as long as she remains an exemplary agent, he’s happy for her to access any resource Division has to get Michael.

And she does. The manhunt is bigger and more focused this time, and its leader more zealous than ever to achieve her goal. She leaves no stone unturned in her quest for revenge, but no matter how many phones she taps, or satellites she retasks, she’s ultimately no more successful the second time around. The best she can surmise is that he’s back in deep cover again, probably out in the wilderness, detached from all society and technology, and arms deep in another plot to enact his revenge.

 _Why did you do it?_ she wails to him when he appears in her dreams. She’s a recruit again, curled up in her simple cot, with no embellishments or presents decorating her cell. And it is that-- a cell. He stands in front of the door, dark and handsome, arms crossed loosely across his chest, and he does nothing but watch her closely, an unreadable expression on his face.

 _I loved him!_ She cries again, and buries her head in her pillow. This is the only place she allows herself to break down, because despite everything, despite all that’s happened, Michael was always the one she confided in. He was always the one who understood her. He was the one who listened without judgement. He was the one who was her friend, who she cared for and was cared for by in return.

Each time the dream comes, she tries a different tact. Sometimes she cries, sometimes she rages. In other dreams, she calmly asks him all she wants to know. He never reacts, and continues to watch her like she’s a unique, interesting animal on display in a zoo. Once, she just stares back at him, neither of them speaking a word until her alarm jerks her into wakefulness.

“Percy wants you to collect the new recruit.” Birkhoff tells her one morning when she walks into the communications centre, steaming cup of coffee in hand.

“That’s not my job.” She says, shrugging him off. 

Birkhoff gives her a look that she can only classify as his ‘Are you really giving me this shit right now?’ look, (he has some quite specific looks) and he hands her a dossier and begins to explain.

“Our op for Triton Pharmaceuticals went south last night. Just as our strike team was readying to take down the target, two meth-heads robbed the place and shot him in the process. We managed to capture one of them before they escaped, she’s in custody now. Alexandra Mason, she says her name is, but that name hasn’t popped in any records. Amanda suspects she’s an illegal, probably a sex-slave brought over from Russia or the Balkans. Either way, she’s got potential, and we’re looking for another girl to fill our quota. We had two cancellations last month.”

“This isn’t my job.” She repeats, pointedly not opening the folder. 

“Look, Nikki--” Birkhoff starts, but Nikita interrupts angrily.

“Where is Percy?” She says.

“I’m right here.” The man says, breezing into the room with the same impeccable timing that had always intimidated her. It made him feel omnipresent and omniscient to her, and she was no longer naive enough to believe he wasn’t.

“Sir,” She nods curtly, aware of her insolence. It’s one thing to speak that way to Birkhoff-- He expects it, but also knows that her anger is usually not directed at him, just a byproduct of her frustrations. Percy, however, doesn’t know her temper as well to know when she is serious and when she is just letting off steam.

“Nikita, I’ve given you a task, and while I appreciate your priorities, we are understaffed and I feel that you have a unique background that will help you empathise a little better with this particular recruit.” Percy says plainly.

“Yes, sir.” She says, feeling scolded and embarrassed. This is the man doing everything he can to help her get her revenge, and here she is acting like a spoilt child. She owes him so much, she is in his debt, and she’s not sure she can ever repay him. One day she will confront Michael for all the pain he’s caused her, and Percy will be the one who gets her there.

She opens Birkhoff’s dossier on ‘Alexandra Mason’ and begins to read.

… … …

He doesn’t anticipate Alex’s motivations. How could he? Until about four months ago he had thought she was dead, and the little broken girl he’d nursed back to health had been his priority, not the strong, independent woman that had grown in her place.

“I want to help you take them down.” She says bluntly.

“No.” He says straight away. “Impossible.”

“I can help you, Michael. You said yourself these people were the ones who killed my family. They killed yours too. We both have that. Please, just let me do something. I’ll do whatever you want.”

“I want you to get out of here and go make a life for yourself.” Michael gestures vaguely to the door. “That’s why I helped you, not to drag you into all this.”

“But that’s just it.” She says. “I’m _already_ in this, and if I was on the inside, I could help you.”

Michael stares at her, astounded at what she’s just said, unsure if she is offering what he thinks she’s offering. “You want to become a recruit?” He asks, skeptically.

“Yes.”

“No, it’s too dangerous.”

“I’d rather be in danger and doing something good, than living a safe life knowing that those evil people are out there destroying families and I had the chance to stop them.”

Michael finds it hard to argue with that, even though he wants to. So he reluctantly begins to teach her what she needs to know. He teaches her self defence, and how to hide that she can protect herself. He teaches her how to read body language, and how to use it to her advantage. He teaches her to pick locks (though she turns out to already be pretty good at that) and he makes her learn the code for a simple computer program that she can install on the server as soon as she’s on the inside. Something tiny and unobtrusive enough that they’ll be able to talk without Birkhoff or any of the other numerous techie nerds noticing. That’s the most important part of this whole endeavour-- it hinges on her ability to recall that code in her sleep, so after she’s memorised it, he tests her night and day to make sure that he’s truly driven the point home.

“I get it!” She cries, one day in frustration. “I know the code. I know it off by heart. I can recite it backwards. _In Russian_!”

Michael stares at her a moment or two, then sets aside his blueprints. “Alex. This is important.”

“I _know_ that, Michael. I know.” Alex says, and sighs deeply. “I’m sorry... I’m just tired.”

He considers her a moment, noting the bags under her eyes, and the digital clock behind her that is flashing 2:14am. He can’t remember the last time they took a break. “Maybe we should call it a night. You need to rest.”

“No. No I’m fine. Let’s just focus on something else for a while. Tell me about the people again. Start with Amanda.”

… … …

Alexandra Mason is just as tiny, strung out, and achingly young as she was when she was first recruited. Sure, the circumstances are a little different-- Heroin versus Ketamine. Sex slave versus homeless child, but the results are the same. Here is a girl who has no one. Here is a girl the world has abandoned, left for dead, or to the vultures. And yet here she is. Alive.

They let her stay in prison for the first few weeks, partly to let her sweat out the drugs on her own-- whether she’s physically strong enough to handle going cold turkey is an extremely strong indicator of future physical stamina, tenacity of spirit, and a range of other things. She’s under surveillance the entire time, and Nikita reviews the footage with a critical eye before having her extracted from the prison and deposited in one of Division’s holding cells.

The girl is completely unconscious for several hours, and while they’re monitoring the room from central command, Nikita chooses to wait inside the cell until she wakes. She knows this is not at all standard practice amongst handlers, many others feeling that it can weaken the teacher-student relationship straight off the bat, but Nikita feels differently. When she woke up in this place, her handler was sitting with back straight and alert in this very seat. And while he was a stranger to her, at first, he had known _just_ what to say to calm her down, with _just_ the right amount of confidence, competence and compassion to ease her into complacency so that he could give her the hard sell.

God, she was soft back then, thinking Michael was her friend. Thinking that he could be...

No. Today is not about that.

Alexandra shifts a little in sleep, and Nikita is watchful for other signs of wakefulness. The shallowness of her breathing, the gentle fluttering of her eyelids and the ruffle of hair as she groans and buries her head in the pillow to hide from the violently bright light from above.

“Good morning, Alex.” Nikita says, doing her best to keep her voice calm and level, but it hardly matters. Alex jerks into wakefulness immediately. She sits up, paranoid eyes darting about the room for the exit, the one directly behind Nikita. Her movements are heavy, though, clearly the drugs they’d used to sedate her in transit have not completely worn off.

“It is Alex, right? Never Alexandra?” Nikita says, and stands from the hard metal chair, heels clicking lightly on the concrete floor.

“Who’re you?” Alex slurs, and then a few seconds later, she asks another question: “Where am I?

“You’re not in prison.” Nikita explains, and takes a step closer to the bed. “Nor are you in Michigan, but that’s not really important to you anymore.”

Alex seems confused, and Nikita remembers the feeling as though it were yesterday. She collects Alex’s dossier from the table at the side of the room, collecting her prison profile, death certificate and because Amanda believes in emotional power of visual aids, a photograph of the place Alexandra Mason’s ashes have been stored.

“You died on November 1st. Your death was ruled a suicide by the coroner, and being a ward of the state you were given a pauper’s funeral.” She places the dossier at the foot of the bed in front of Alex, and taps at the photograph of the cemetery memorial wall. “Your ashes are stored here.”

She pauses for a moment to let that news settle in and assess how well Alex is taking these new revelations. Nikita notes the dilated pupils and the laboured breathing-- the girl is well on her way to a panic attack, so Nikita tones it back.

“My name is Nikita, and I work for the government.” She says in her calmest tone, clasping her hands together in front of her belly, in a gesture reminiscent of a pregnant woman. If she can get this girl to see her as a motherly figure, or even as a big sister, she will be on the fast-track to trust and that is the most important characteristic of a successful handler-recruit relationship. “Alex, we’ve decided to give you a second chance.”

“Why? Why me?” The panic is still there, but is solidifying into anger. Nikita expected that.

“Because you’re a beautiful young girl, with no ties and no paper trail,” She says breezily, stepping away from the bed. “But what _really_ caught our attention is how you killed a man we were about to take out.”

Alex bolts from the bed, adrenaline fuelling her flight response with great energy. But Nikita expected that too, and as the girl runs past she snaps her hand out and snatches Alex’s wrist, forcing her forward with a kick to the back of the knee. She holds the wrist tightly in such a way that if Alex struggles she’ll only hurt herself, “If you stand, I’ll break your wrist.” She says simply.

“I didn’t kill no one.”

“His name was Kyle, he was the head of a drug smuggling ring.”

“It was Ronnie that done it.”

“ _Ronnie_ was found dead of an overdose behind your apartment.” Nikita says, and pushes a little harder. Alex cries out in pain, but Nikita is certain she now has Alex’s full attention. “No one came to his funeral either.” 

Nikita lets go of the girl’s wrist, and Alex quickly scrambles away from her, clearly upset and holds one hand cautiously with the other. Nikita suspects she’ll be sporting a bruise on her wrist for the next few days.

“Your life is over, Alex. I’m here to offer you a new one.” She says, and watches as a silent tear rolls down the girl’s cheek. “But you have to be willing to earn it.”

The silence lays heavy between them for a long moment, then Nikita hears the words they need from Alex: “What do I gotta do?”

And they have their newest recruit.

… … …

They agreed that the best thing for Michael to be doing while Alex was being recruited was for him to cause as much trouble as possible to keep eyes on him and away from her. Classic misdirection. 

He visits his family’s graves for the first time since he defected, buried in a small family plot outside Boston, which kicks up enough dust into the wind that Birkhoff himself visits the site, making it all the easier for Michael to kidnap the techie and place the decoy bug. They exchange a few heated words (from Birkhoff’s disdain towards him, Michael can tell that Percy has crafted some slippery lie that gives him sinister motivations for leaving Division) before Birkhoff is knocked unconscious again and deposited back on the streets for Division’s retrieval.

To be honest, he hadn’t expected Birkhoff to be the responding agent in charge. He’d thought it would be Roan or Nikita, someone with tracking experience, but clearly times have changed. Maybe Birkhoff is a field agent now too, it has been more than four years. The bug on Birkhoff gives him enough warning to finagle himself an invitation to the Gala Percy will be attending the following night. It’s a perfect opportunity to stick his head above water and cause a scene. 

He also gets confirmation that Alex has made it through the first stage of recruitment with Nikita as her handler. Michael is hopeful that she’ll have installed the shell program by tomorrow, and they’ll be able to talk directly once again. For all his planning and for all Alex’s confidence in their plan, he still worries about her and wants to make sure she is as safe as possible. So to hear she is adjusting to the mess hall diet (as atrocious as the macaroni can be) is a comfort.

The gala is a carbon copy of any of the other numerous galas he’d attended as Percy’s personal body man. The uniform is black tie and cocktail dresses, and as is the case with these things, the the champagne flows freely while the delicious gourmet food remains largely untouched. At a casual glance he spots at least five senators, three on important defence subcommittees, and several big name representatives for military contractors. Over there, the Ambassador to France is holding a conversation with someone Michael is convinced is an escort hired by the Representative from Delaware.

He breezes past them all, making a bee-line towards the bar where he knows Percy will be with whoever he brought along to protect him tonight. The man always needed a scotch in his hand for these kinds of things, and always drank them too quickly to move very far away from the bartender serving them.

And sure enough, he spots the head of Division standing only a few steps away from the bar, and when he steps to the side a little to greet a Cabinet minister, he sees the body man he brought with him.

Nikita.

She doesn’t spot him straight away, and he takes the opportunity to study her, to see if she’s changed at all in the years since he saw her last. Her hair is longer, and lighter, as though she’s been spending a lot of time outside and the sun has gently faded it to a warmer hue; the tan she’s sporting supports that theory as well. The dress that hugs her curves is no doubt one of Amanda’s flattering choices, all metal and geometric patterns, the gold and silver sparkles drawing attention to her best assets, but he can see the subtle outline of a knife hidden at her thigh and he knows that she has a gun tucked away in her purse.

All of that he expected, but what he didn’t anticipate is the sadness he sees on her face. She’s covering it well, beneath expertly applied makeup and the dazzling smile of an escort, but she had always had a _spirit_ that could only be seen in the sparkle of her eyes, and the tiniest quirk of a dimple-- It’s just not there anymore.

She notices him before Percy does, but she wastes no time in putting herself between him and the target, just like he’d taught her so many years ago. The way she clutches at her purse confirms the hidden weapon there, and Michael slips his hands casually into his pockets.

“Good evening.” He says, “Have you tried the hors d'oeuvres? They’re delicious.”

“Michael.” Percy says, from his place behind Nikita.

“Percy.” Michael nods politely, eyeing a passing senator. He quickly darts a hand out to grab the man’s elbow, pulling him into the conversation, effectively obtaining his own human shield. “Senator Kelly. We were just discussing the new defence budget. You’re on the subcommittee, am I right?”

“Er, yes.” The senator stammers, clearly confused, yet perceptive enough to know that he’s been dragged into quite an awkward conversation. Percy and Nikita exchange a silent look, she passes him her clutch and he gives her a glass of champagne in exchange.

“Fantastic!” Michael says, clapping the man on the back. “I’d like you to meet my friends. This is Percy and his date... I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Nikita.” She says, but Michael can’t read her voice, she has forced it into being neutral. Something has happened here, something is wrong. But what, he doesn’t know.

Nikita extends her hand to the Senator and Percy bumps into her from behind, upsetting the glass spilling champagne all down the senator’s front.

“Oh I’m so clumsy!” Nikita cries, and Percy says: “Quick, you should get some seltzer on that.”

“Here, I’ll help.” She says, and with a glance towards Michael that is as cold as ice, she guides the Senator away from the confrontation, leaving Percy with her weapon. 

“Do you really think threatening Senator Kelly is going to scare me?” Percy asks.

“Please.” Michael scoffs. “Don’t mock me, Percy.”

“Then why are you here? You know you can’t kill me.” As if to emphasise his point, he knocks back the last of his scotch and slams it down on the bar beside him with a loud clunk. “You know I have insurance.”

“If I can get to you here, I can get to you anywhere. I can get to your funding and I can get to that insurance. I’ll rip it apart until eventually you’ll be the last thing left, and then I’ll kill you.” Michael promises. “You made a mistake, making an enemy of me.”

“You have it all planned out, don’t you. A mission plan to knock Division and I over one step at a time, like bowling pins.”

“And you think you can predict my every move.” Michael points out. “How’s that worked out for you?”

“You won’t make it out of here alive.” Percy promises, and Michael sees that Nikita has left the Senator to clean his own shirt and is stalking her way back over to the two of them. There is a fire in her eyes again, but it is not one that Michael is comfortable with. She seems determined, focused; it’s the look she has before she takes down a target, and she’s zeroing in on him.

“We’ll see.” Michael mutters, and draws a small cigarette lighter from his pocket. He flicks the lid and lights it, and the car bomb he set up outside the hotel explodes with a rocketing BOOM, shaking the building, and all the occupants of the bar, destabilising Percy and Nikita in her overly tall heels, giving Michael enough of an opportunity to bolt for his exit.

Michael vaults a toppled table and slips through the service entrance, sprinting as fast as he can down corridors and through the kitchen. He hears the tell-tale clack of a woman running in heels behind him, and he knows that Nikita is in hot pursuit, but doesn’t stop to check, pushing a kitchen hand out of his way and into a tray of plates which crash to the floor causing enough of a distraction for him to push out the back door and into the alleyway. He gets about five steps before the door slams open again and he hears her cry: “STOP, OR I’LL SHOOT.”

He stops running.

“Hands where I can see them.” She demands, and he hears the click of the safety on her gun being switched off. “Take your gun and toss it to the left. Safety on.”

He keeps his left arm raised, but slips his right hand into his jacket, pulling his own gun from the holster and throws it against the wall to the side as instructed.

“Turn around.”

He does so slowly, being careful not to make any sudden movements. “Nikita.” He says quietly, and though they are ten yards away from each other, and there are sirens and all sorts of loud noises coming from the other end of the alleyway, he knows that she can hear him perfectly.

“No.” She says bluntly, pointedly aiming her gun at his heart. “You don’t get to do that.”

His confusion rises. Something _has_ happened to her, that’s clear enough, and that look in her eye (he recognises it now) means she blames him for something. But what?

“Do what, Nikki?” He asks, as calmly as he can.

“You don’t get to _placate_ me.” She spits. “You don’t get to calm me down.”

She is almost vibrating in her anger, and he can see the effort she is taking to hold her gun steady. He wants nothing more than to make it right, whatever it is, but honestly has no idea.

“All right,” He says, and lowers his hands a little. “What do you want me to do?” He asks.

She hesitates a moment, and the gun drifts to the side, and that’s all he needs. He slips his hand to the holster at the small of his back and pulls out his backup and fires. He hits her in the shoulder, and her whole body whips back, overbalancing and toppling to the ground.

He is by her side immediately, stripping her of her weapon, but he gently lifts her up from the bitumen to check the shot hasn’t done too much damage. Dark blood is dripping down her chest, staining her designer dress. “It’s a clean wound.” He says, as she gasps in pain. “Through and through. You’ll be fine.”

“Screw you.” She says weakly, overwhelmed by the pain.

He frowns, still so confused. “Nikita. Whatever they said I did. I promise I didn’t.” He says honestly, because he cannot think of a single thing he could’ve done to hurt her this badly.

She glares, and he hears a commotion coming from the kitchen. He doesn’t have any more time to explain and hash it out with her. All he can hope for is another opportunity for clarity, and now that Alex is on the inside, maybe it’ll be sooner rather than later.

He stands up, careful to lower her gently back to the ground, and then he runs.

… … …

Her arm is still stiff, but the pain is mostly gone and she’s finally rid of the annoying sling. The physical therapist puts her through a few exercises, gripping balls, lifting weights, and though he insists that she not exert herself too much, that this is just for diagnosis, she can’t help but lift through the pain and push herself. It has always been her way.

Sweat trickles down her brow, and she grunts a little and almost drops the weight on her foot, but Liam is there and taking it from her immediately, “Nikita.” He chastises, and she eases herself back down onto the mat. “You’ll do more damage with that attitude towards your recovery.”

“I know.” She says, resigned, and tentatively flexes her hand.

“If you push yourself too hard you won’t do yourself any favours.”

“I _know_.” She glares up at him, and puts a hand to her shoulder, which feels like it’s glowing red hot. “I’m done for today.”

“All right.” Liam says, and holds out a hand to help her up from the mat which she refuses, pushing herself back to her feet using her good hand.

Liam hands her her towel. “Remember to do your exercises.” 

“Yes.”

She wipes her face with the towel and leaves as quickly as she can, deciding that what her shoulder could really do with is a few Tylenol, an ice-pack and an early night. Instead of heading directly back to the locker room she detours via the medical bay, knowing that it’s the quickest place to get the painkillers she needs without having to wait, and at this time of day there won’t be any doctors or nurses hanging around to ask questions. 

Nikita is searching through pill bottles in the medicine cabinet within minutes, casting aside the aspirin and the Valium to find the little ibuprofen bottle at the back. She twists the cap with her better hand, but a sharp pain shoots through her shoulder when she tries, and she can’t help the grimace that crosses her face.

“Want some help with that?” A slurred voice asks from behind, startling her.

She turns around. “...Birkhoff.” She says.

The side of his face is still puffy from his earlier dental surgery, and the bags under his eyes rival the ones under her own, but he has the smallest of smiles on his face. He steps forward and takes the little pill bottle from her and twists the cap off with ease. He taps four pills out into his palm and hands two over to her.

“Here,” He says, then returns the cap to the bottle and replaces it in the cabinet. “The Novocain is wearing off, and I don’t deal well with pain.”

“I’d noticed.” She says wryly, and turns around to fill two glasses from the filtered water dispenser just to the side of the medicine cabinet, and hands the spare to the nerd.

“Cheers.” He says, and knocks the edge of his glass to hers.

The pills goes down easily, but she closes her eyes as she swallows, disliking the feel of it as they slide down her throat.

“You all right, Nikki?” Birkhoff asks, and she knows he’s genuinely concerned. His voice is quiet, and he hasn’t used her nickname in a while. Mostly because she’s been avoiding him. Him and pretty much every one else of importance in Division. It’s just been her, and physical therapists and recruits for weeks.

“I’m fine.” She says, and it sounds stiff, even to her.

Birkhoff doesn’t let it slide. “Don’t do that.” He says bluntly. “You can lie to Amanda about how you’re coping all you like, and you can tell Percy you’re fine. Whatever. But _don’t_ lie to me.”

“I’m not, Birkhoff.” She says, and sighs. “I’m just tired. And sore... I’m just going to go home.”

“No, you’re gonna stay here and we’re going to have this conversation.”

He shoots a glance behind him to the open medical bay door, and moves more quickly than usual to shut it and give them some privacy. If it comes to it, she knows that she can get past him if she needs to, whether by force or not, even with her injury. But the confrontation wouldn’t be worth it in the long run.

“Why have you been avoiding me?” He asks. The small smile is gone.

She places her glass on the counter behind her and uses the time to gather her thoughts, assess the situation and figure out what to do next.

She decides to go with the truth. Or at least what she knows of it. “I don’t know if I can trust you anymore.” She says, and it’s so quiet that she’s a little uncertain Birkhoff will be able to hear her.

He seems to hear her fine though. “What do you mean, you can’t trust me?”

His gaze burns just as warm as the healing wound in her shoulder, and it is just as uncomfortable to endure. She looks away.

“It’s just something Michael said.” She confesses finally. “Or rather what he didn’t say. In the alleyway. Just after he shot me.”

“And you’re trusting him over me?” Birkoff asks, and she can tell he’s offended. “After what he did to you?”

She ignores the accusation and continues on. “He didn’t seem to know what he’d done. He knew I was... angry with him. And he knew that I blamed him for something. But he genuinely didn’t know what was wrong.”

“So he’s lying to you. You saw the footage.”

“But what does that actually _show_?” Nikita asks, and the emotional stability she’s been aiming for throughout this conversation falters. “Nothing, not really. It’s just a video, we doctor videos all the time. _You_ doctor videos all the time.”

“You think...?” Birkhoff asks. “Me? No. Nikki, I’d never do that to you.”

“But you do it to so many people _every day_. And then we found that bug on you!” Nikita cries and runs a hand through her hair, frustrated. “Can you see why I might not believe you? Can you see why that might bring up some trust issues, Birkhoff? This is messing with my head.”

Silence stretches between them, but now Birkhoff is glaring at her, but it’s not his worst glare, it’s more his ‘you’re an idiot’ glare. “Well. I didn’t.” He says with certainty. “I promise. And there are ways of verifying his claim, ways without involving Amanda and Percy. But guess what, Nikki? Those ways involve _trusting me_.”

“What ways?”

He scoffs. “Please. There’s always something. No matter how tiny, if it’s been faked we’ll be able to find it. If we can’t find anything, you’ll have just confirmed everything we already knew.”

“And you’d help me with that?”

“Nikki.” He says, and his lips touch into a smile again. “You just need to ask.”

… … …

Alex was right. Her being on the inside makes sabotaging Division’s ops that much easier. He worries, a little, now that Birkhoff’s implant has been discovered, that she’s more exposed, but clearly he didn’t give her enough credit. She takes initiative, and seems to know the best ways to get the most useful information out to him without arousing suspicion. Using the information she provides, they prevent assassinations, foil crimes, and generally throw a rather large spanner into Division’s works. Michael knows he has Percy’s attention now. 

So when Alex sends him a brief message that Percy is bugging out to Montreal, alone, he knows he has to follow. Percy never went anywhere alone when Michael was his right hand man. At least not that he knew of. There were always protection details and bodyguards. Half the time Michael was on them, or leading them, so Michael packs his things and heads north straight away to Canada.

Alex wasn’t able to give him a reason for Percy’s quick escape, so Michael has to figure that much out for himself. He figures he can use a few contacts, do a little digging to find out the man’s mission, but is genuinely surprised when a simple Google News search gives him the most likely answer.

It’s a news report covering the attempted robbery of a bank in central Montreal earlier in the morning that went awry when one of the hostages fought back, killing all three of the robbers before escaping on foot. It’s remarkable enough on its own, but the security footage showing a close-up shot of the hostage, who police have been unable to identify is what convinces him.

It’s Owen, the man he fought in Daniel Monroe’s apartment. His hair is a little longer, and he looks a little chubbier in the face; it’s the same look most Division agents get when embedded in long-term undercover ops, and it’s just the break Michael needs.

He isn’t sure how far behind Percy he is when he’s rifling through Owen’s mail trying to get an idea of what kind of op the man is running, but he meets the nice, albeit cagey neighbour and gets a lead on tracking him down. Michael isn’t completely sure what Owen is here to do, he can’t find any of the usual signs of reconnaissance, or espionage. It just seems like he’s here working part time at some landscaping business, and is clearly in a new relationship with the neighbour.

He does get Owen’s cell phone number from a phone bill and uses one of his contacts to get a trace on the cell’s GPS, which takes him to an old abandoned middle school about twenty minutes away.

The classroom he finds Owen in is clearly an old biology lab, and the agent sustained some wounds in the crossfire this morning. Michael sees sterile strips, bandages, rubbing alcohol and a needle and twine. Owen’s preoccupation at administering his makeshift field-dressing gives Michael the opportunity he needs to get the one-up this time.

“Owen Elliot. Long time no see.” He says, gun pointed at the man.

“Michael.” Owen says, and turns around slowly, in such a way that Michael knows the man’s wounds are probably more serious than needing just field dressings.

Owen’s eyes flicker down for a split second, down at the counter, Michael follows his gaze and that’s when he sees it. He’s seen one before, in Percy’s office on his desk. It’s one of his Black Boxes. The insurance. And then everything falls into place.

“So you’re his body man for this Black Box, then?” Michael says, connecting the dots as he speaks. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of those.”

Owen looks at the box again, and then leans over and picks it up. “Yeah? See for yourself.” He says, then throws it in Michael’s face, and he catches it an inch before it hits him square on the nose, but Owen’s distraction works. The blond man tackles him to the floor, knocking the gun and black box out of his hands. Michael kicks out and rolls away from under him. He manages to pull himself up into a crouch as Owen rights himself, but the man is on him again, throwing punches so hard and so fast Michael can barely keep up. The man is _strong_ , and he’s _fast_ , much stronger and faster than the last time they met, and Michael realises that he has badly misjudged this situation. He’d thought the extra puff to Owen’s face had been baby-fat, gained from a life of sedentary repetitiveness that extended cover brings, but now he sees the bulk to Owen’s muscles, and the way that his skin is straining across muscle and bone, and he knows for sure he’s on steroids.

He blocks another hard blow to the face but takes a quick jab to the ribs which knocks the air from his lungs. He brings his hands up instinctively to block his face, but no blow comes, instead, the other man seems to have stalled, and shoves a hand roughly inside Michael’s now slightly torn jacket and pulls out the letters he’d taken earlier.

“You went by my house.” He says, accusingly.

Michael coughs, and steps away. “Yeah, I met your neighbour. Lovely girl. Nice little butterfly things.” And he points to the butterfly drawings on the wall.

It’s the wrong thing to say. Owen charges him again, this time bouncing himself off one of the counters to kick Michael in the face. He reels from the blow and manages to block a few hits before he finds himself over-powered and over-played, twisted into a strangling head lock.

“What did you do to her?” Owen demands, shouting into his ear. Michael struggles against the hold, pushing at the stronger man’s arms, but they don’t budge. He can’t suck any air in, and he feels his wind-pipe being crushed.

“She wasn’t involved!” Owen yells again.

Michael finally manages to croak out “Nothing. She’s fine.” But his voice is weak and raspy, and he feels dangerously light-headed. 

Owen’s grip slackens just the slightest bit giving Michael enough room to jab his elbow hard into the other man’s groin. Owen doubles over in pain, and Michael runs, leaving his gun and the black box behind. 

He spends the next few hours nursing his wounds and decides another confrontation isn’t a possibility, Owen is too strong, too fast, and too much for him to take. Either he's slipping, in his time away from Division, or Owen is taking something, and Michael knows he can't afford another close-contact encounter with that man.

He continues to track the man's phone, and watches from afar when the man finally makes a move from the school, presumably to take the black box to Percy. But the man heads back to the apartment instead. As far as Michael knows it's still surrounded by cops, and if Alex hadn't insisted that Percy was here alone Michael would assume there are Division agents sitting on it as well.

When he gets back home though, something feels wrong. The police are gone from outside, and even though it's dusk there are no lights on in the building. It's like no one is home. He watches Owen slip in the side of the building through the fire escape into the nice neighbour's apartment. 

And that's when he sees the strike team surround the building. He instinctively sinks down deep into the car seat, just in case anyone looks his way. From what he can tell it's a standard 6 man team, two on guard, two on point, two taking up the rear. No one is guarding the window Owen entered though, and Michael assumes there is a sniper positioned somewhere near by with a clear shot.

He knows he just has to make a go of it if he wants to get those two out of the way. He slips out of the car and sprints across the road, taking the same route Owen does and launches himself off the same dumpster to reach the fire escape. He catches the rung of the ladder and climbs up onto the platform, pulls his gun from the holster and slips through the open window. 

Owen's gun is on him straight away, pushing Emily the neighbour protectively behind him. But Michael ignores that and instead shoots the first division operative that bursts through the door, landing a shot straight between the eyes.

He shoots at the other, but they duck back behind the doorway and out of sight. Owen spins around, keeping the girl protectively behind him at all times, and trains his gun in the same direction as Michael, managing to pick off another of the operatives, who slumps lifelessly to the ground, partially blocking the doorway.

There is a sharp whizzing noise, and Emily falls awkwardly to the side. Michael notices before Owen does, but the blonde man doesn’t miss it for long when she falls into him. He turns around and sees her there, with the sniper shot right between the eyes, and Michael knows from the look on the man’s face he’ll need to get him out of here as quickly as possible. He knows that look, that apoplectic rage.

He grabs Owen by the shoulder and forces him to look at him. “Owen.” Michael says forcefully. “We need to go. _Now_.”

“ _No!_ ” The man cries, brandishing his gun at the door, and he fires a few more shots. “I’ll kill them all.”

“Percy will kill us both if we don’t go now.” Michael insists, pulling the man back towards the fire escape. “ _Now_.”

Owen shrugs off Michael’s hand and takes a step forward, and the torrent of gunfire returns. Michael ducks instinctively behind a desk, but Owen isn’t quick enough and gets winged in the thigh. Michael fires a few more shots at the door for cover and leaps forward and grabs the other man again. The bullet seems to have knocked sense into him-- he’s pliable this time and lets himself be pulled back down the fire escape. 

They leave Emily where she is, dead on the floor.


	3. Chapter 3

_Love, like a blow to the head has knocked me down and I’m bleeding_

… … …

“Percy is sure Michael is dead.” Nikita says to Birkhoff, late one night, a few weeks after the debacle in Montreal.

“You don’t think so?” Birkhoff asks quietly, and he finishes typing another line of code into whatever new program he’s writing, then turns to face her. Nikita shrugs and settles herself down onto his couch, pushing the empty bags of potato chips and red bull cans off the edge and onto the floor, and fluffing up the cushions beside her.

“I don’t really know.” She confesses, and she wishes that Birkhoff was blasting his deafening techno music so that there is something to fill the deep silence that seems to stretch between them. “It just doesn’t feel right. Maybe he’s just hiding again, maybe he’s hiding that Owen fellow. He had one of the black boxes, maybe they’re figuring out how to use that information.”

“They won’t be able to. Not easily.” Birkhoff says, and he has a certain look on his face that makes her think maybe he shouldn’t be sharing that with her so freely. Nikita knows that she doesn’t know everything that goes on here, Birkhoff knows things she doesn’t, but it goes the other way as well. No matter how omnipresent Birkhoff claims to be, there are black spots in his intel.

But honestly it’s not important. “I don’t have any evidence. Just a weird feeling about it. I don’t feel settled, nothing feels complete.”

“Well, I guess we’ll see soon enough whether your gut is right.” Birkhoff says, and returns back to his coding.

Nikita leans back on his couch against the fluffed cushions and just breathes. The last few weeks have been hard, they’ve felt harder and more stressful than the last few years, somehow, and every time she thinks about why, her stomach rolls and rebels against her. She finds herself hiding from Percy more often, as though he can somehow read her thoughts and knows that she has been doubting everything.

Michael is dead, supposedly. He’s the one who killed her fiance. She should be elated. Percy certainly is, though he isn’t showing it in the regular, normal way that most human beings do-- he’s walking around Division with more confidence and more zeal than ever. But she isn’t. She wanted a chance to speak with Michael again. She wanted to ask him about Daniel, about why he killed him, why Daniel was ever a target. And then, she wanted to be the one to kill him herself. Or she wanted to be the one to forgive him. Or she wanted to do both at once. She’s never been able to decide exactly what she’d do if she saw him again, because she knows that there is more to the story than she’s been given.

Nikita watches Birkhoff type frantically away at his work station, surrounded by his mega computers, with their flashing lights, hypnotically red, yellow, blue, green, flashing away. He seems so absorbed in whatever Percy has told him to do today, she thinks it’s hacking the CIA, but she hasn’t been watching too closely. She thinks to herself that this mess of a man right here is probably her only friend, which is something she never would’ve predicted when she was recruited to Division nine years ago, and the man on whom she’s come to rely so heavily.

She pushes herself up from the couch and begins rifling through one of Birkhoff’s other workstations, pushing aside the rest of his food scraps and spare computer parts until she extracts a laptop from the pile, and she takes it back with her to the couch.

A few weeks back Birkhoff partitioned a section of the server off for their own private use (what Percy doesn’t know about won’t kill him) and she uses it to access the security footage of Daniel’s death. She’s watched these ten minutes of footage countless times, so many times that she knows exactly how the wrinkles in Daniel’s shirt sit across his shoulder, and she could replicate the exact splatter of blood that is spread across Michael’s cheek. She can list exactly what each man is wearing. Daniel is in his pink shirt (real men wear pink) and neatly pressed navy suit pants. The jacket he’d been wearing all day is hung in the crook of his elbow, and the same hand is holding his briefcase while he rifles in his pocket with his other for the keys to his apartment. She watches every time how his watch (the one he inherited from his Grandfather, that he had to manually wind every day so that it kept perfect time) catches on the lip of his pocket before he pulls out the keys then disappears into the security camera’s blind spot just outside the apartment door.

She watches the next 7 minutes, as nothing happens in the halls. The security footage has no sound, so she has no way of knowing if a microphone would’ve picked up anything that happened within the walls of Daniel’s apartment. If they had yelled at each other, if you could hear the struggle. The walls of the apartment complex were thin, she and Daniel had been able to hear the neighbours above them cook dinner to salsa music, and the neighbours to the side make passionate, noisy love after they’d finished watching Grey’s Anatomy.

Then Michael emerges suddenly from the same corner Daniel had disappeared into. Unlike Daniel, who was casually returning home, Michael sprints down the corridor, dressed all in black, though the soles of his shoes have a small section of red rubber inset into them, most likely the brand, and instead of waiting for the elevator he slams through the emergency exit door and into the stairwell to make a speedy exit. Only once during his escape does he look behind him, and that is as he opens the emergency door, when he glances back down the corridor with a stoic expression on his face. Nikita freezes the footage on that one frame, and tries to read the lines of his face. What was he thinking, as he ran away? Was that regret? Was it anger? Was it success?

She couldn’t say.

Frustrated, she pushes the laptop to her side, and returns her attentions to Birkhoff, who is still studiously working amidst his detritus. She waits until he seems to have paused for reflection, and she interrupts him quietly.

"We're going about finding him the wrong way." Nikita says, and rubs her tired eyes with the balls of her hands. "He's too good at hiding where he is, if we haven't had any luck for the past five years, we're certainly not going to find him now, and if we assume that if Owen is with him now, Michael will be keeping him out of sight as well. Or at least teaching him how to hide from us in the same way."

Birkhoff turns to look at her but doesn't reply, instead he reaches for the luke-warm coffee resting beside his elbow and takes a sip. 

"We need to start thinking like him.” Nikita goes on, “What's the one thing we _know_ he wants."

"To take down Division." Birkhoff says immediately. "He hasn't exactly been quiet about that."

Nikita shakes her head. "No. Well. Yes, but what I mean is we don't know _how_ he's going to do that. Maybe he'll use the black box somehow, now he has access to one, but he wants something more than that."

"What?" Birkhoff asks, frowning a little. 

"He wants revenge. He wants to kill the man who killed his family." Nikita says bluntly, because that is what she wants as well, and they both know it.

"Kasim Tariq."

"Yes." Nikita nods, and snatches up the laptop once again. She quickly launches ShadowNet and searches the terrorist's name, and in an instant a summary of information they have on the ex-Division agent is in front of her. "I assume we have an intelligence trace on him." She asks, and Birkhoff is already typing away at his own computer, and tracking down any new information of his own.

"Yep, though it's been pretty quiet these last few months from what I can see. There's a note here saying he has ties to Gogol, which is probably why."

"Gogol." Nikita repeats, and files that away to process later. "Send me everything you can find on Tariq." She says perfunctorily, knowing that for her, Birkhoff would do it anyway. They have worked closely enough these past few years for him to be able to safely anticipate her every whim, and vice versa.

"Done." And sure enough, her computer lets off a little _ping_ notification to confirm.

"Thank you." She says, and opens the secured file. "Can you restrict access to you and me only, please? And if anything new pops up, or we get a confirmation of his current whereabouts. Let me know straight away."

Birkhoff pauses for a moment, and Nikita panics for a second, wondering if she’s asked too much of him. If this need for secrecy is too much for Birkhoff to handle. But then Birkhoff answers: "Sure thing, Nikki." in an almost cheerful tone, and she knows that he is her best friend.

… … ...

Looking after Owen is nothing like looking after Alex. In fact, on the whole, Michael finds that living with a recovering drug addict _far_ easier than living with this acerbic, barely tolerable man. At first Michael writes Owen’s attitude off as grief, mixed in with physical pain-- the bullet wound to the man’s leg took a while to heal, and Michael’s skills as a surgeon left much to be desired.

But then he heals, and the relationship does not improve very much, though at least they coexist as reluctant allies. They have enough in common to know they’re on the same side, but that’s about all they agree on. Owen refuses to give up the location of his Black Box, insisting that it is safer if only he knows it, and Michael refuses to give Owen details about Alex, though he couldn’t keep the fact that he had a man on the inside at Division secret for very long.

Not to mention, Owen still holds a grudge about Michael shooting him. Michael may have neglected to apologise for that. But the guy was a dick. He'll get over it one day.

In the meantime, they spend their days skirting around each other, like skittish, territorial cats. Michael reluctantly shows Owen the ropes, hands over some of his contacts (though not _all_ of them, Michael's not stupid) so that he can get his own cash, ID, weapons, anything he needs really, while staying off Division's radar. They establish a method of communicating with each other so that when they separate (which will be as soon as freaking possible, as far as Michael is concerned) they'll still be able to keep in touch all while being far, far away from each other.

He finishes up a brief instant message with Alex, who's been keeping him updated on the fallout of his "death" in Division, when he realises Owen snuck in at some-point. Michael slams the laptop shut quickly, and glares at the Guardian. "I thought we agreed you'd stop sneaking around." He says lowly and gets up from his spot, ostensibly to take his now empty coffee cup back to the kitchen to wash up, but really it's to put him on even footing with Owen.

"I wasn't sneaking." Owen says, and the impatience that Michael finds so dangerous is there, hovering behind his words.

"Well you weren't going out of your way to make yourself known." Michael says, unable to keep the grouchiness from his voice. He snatches up the empty coffee cup and the plate on which his lunch had sat. "What do you want?"

Owen doesn't answer. Instead he steps over and opens the laptop, where the last few lines of text from Alex are still hovering on the screen: _Percy is the only one who thinks you're really dead. Everyone else, though..._

"Do you have a way of getting her out?" Owen asks evenly, "Because they'll find her eventually. They know everything."

"Don't you worry about that." Michael says dismissively. "I've got it under control."

"Really?" Owen says, raising a skeptical eyebrow. "Because we've been here for weeks, and I'm starting to get the idea you don't know as much as we always thought you did."

"We?"

"Well, maybe you know more now you have your little mole in there, but you've just been flying by the seat of your pants these past few years, haven't you?"

Michael lets out a wry, dry chuckle. "You're trying that tack are you?" He asks, knowingly. "You're trying to get me to doubt myself, so that I'll let you use the information off the black box."

"It's not like I have to ask for permission, do I?" Owen spits. "I'm the one who knows it's location, not you. I'm the one with the power."

"Yeah, And I'm the one who saved your life." Michael stabs a finger at the man's chest, hitting his sternum.

"Funny. I see you as the guy who shot me twice." Owen says.

Michael rolls his eyes. This conversation is going exactly the same way it always does, around in circles, with both of them arcing up, resisting the authority and expertise and opinions of the other. Frankly, Michael is getting tired of it.

"Using the black box isn't an option, until we have _all_ of them, and you know it." Michael says. "If you're done creeping around for the day, we can keep debriefing each other, see if we can remember anything else we might be able to use against Percy."

Owen begrudgingly accedes the point and a few minutes later they're settling down across the table from one another with a pen and pad each. 

"It's your turn to start." Owen says, twisting the ball point pen in his fingers. "Let me have em."

Michael quickly skims his notes, they've spent the last few sessions covering Owen's role as a Guardian, what it entailed, whether he knew of the other Guardians, where they were assigned, protocol, contingency plans to see if there was any way that the position could be exploited. Owen in turn had questions about Michael's time away from Division-- what he's spent his time doing. He spent more than his fair share of time picking at Michael to reveal his mole, but Michael had drawn a line in the sand on that one, til he completely trusted the other man. He wasn't even sure that day would ever come, to be quite frank.

Today he decides that he should probably be a little less intense in his questioning, maybe focus on their common ground. 

"Tell me about Daniel Munroe." He says simply, putting his pen to paper. "He was my first real lead after I got out of Division, I was keeping tabs on him for weeks, but I could never figure out what they wanted with him. And you were there."

But what he thought would be a simple answer clearly is not as clear-cut as he thinks. Owen shoots a suspicious glare in his direction, and Michael wonders what possible nerve he's hit this time, Owen is so damn sensitive about every damn thing...

"What?" Owen finally asks, and stops twisting his pen between his fingers.

"Daniel Munroe. What was Division's interest in him?" Michael repeats, but this time he is a little less certain, because Owen now looks genuinely dumbfounded, and more than a little bit uncomfortable.

"You mean you don't know?" Owen asks, tentatively.

"No, that's why I'm asking. I know Division was interested, and it was all but confirmed when I ran into you, but..."

"I killed him that night." Owen says bluntly, cutting him off. "You weren't meant to be there, but we figured afterwards that you knew I was coming and had tried to intercept me. You didn't try very hard, but..."

It is Michael's turn to be confused. He tries to process this new information, to slot it in with what he already knows to be true: Owen was a Cleaner before he became a Guardian, and he was one of the best. Daniel had been in close contact with a Division operative in the months before his death. It must've been because he had some intel, or some connection that was a threat to 'national security' or whatever bullshit excuse Percy had given it.

"Alright." Michael says with a nod. "So after I got away, you killed him. That explains why no one followed me. I know I shot you, but I figured you had backup nearby, it always bothered me I got away so clean."

"No. There wasn't any backup, just me, and I had strict orders to carry out my mission at any cost." Owen explained. "He arrived home about twenty minutes after you and I fought. I killed him with your gun, set it up to look like a house invasion gone wrong."

Michael nods. This he all knew, from news articles and police reports. "Why was he a target?"

Owen's brow ruffles again. "He was engaged to a Division agent in deep cover, he was a civilian. Percy gave me the order to take him out himself."

This aligns so well with everything he knows about Division policies that he’s honestly kicking himself he hadn’t thought of it before now. The man had no real intelligence value, no connections to anything of importance. It’s really the only thing that makes sense. "Which one?"

Owen pauses for a long moment, "Nikita." He says finally, and Michael feels his heart drop out of his chest.

_Nikita_.

And everything just falls into place in front of his eyes. All those little things make sense, the hit on Daniel of course, but mostly Nikita, her reactions towards him and Birkhoff's animosity towards him. And then other things that Alex has mentioned, about the restructuring of Division, Nikita's rise within the ranks, and the strange fierce loyalty that Percy had fostered in her in the years he'd been away.

"They framed me for it, didn't they." Michael says, not really needing Owen to answer, because he already knows.

"Yeah. They had footage of you coming into the building, they spliced it together. With that and your gun and prints at the scene..." Owen trails off, "It was pretty convincing."

"It always is." Michael says with a sigh, and gets up from the table. "We'll do this later. I need some time to think."

"Take your time, man. Whatever you need."

… … …

At first she worried that she wouldn't be able to keep her little investigation away from others. The guilt weighed on her for a while as she wondered whether she was right to doubt what she knew, whether it was fair, whether it was just. She has always liked finding things out for herself, having the evidence laid out in front, clear and plain as day, without needing to doubt its integrity, but she knows that that is a luxury born of self reliance. Trust is something given and earned, and these people have trusted in her all these years and yet here she is, repaying them with...

With what?

But when she pulls on her tailored suit, with its slim-line, neatly pressed pants, and the corseted jacket, and she pulls her hair into a practical yet stylish pony-tail, it is as though she is pulling on armor. No, not armor, a costume: she is playing a character. Nikita, the faithful, trustworthy, loyal agent. The one who has never doubted anything, who believes the system she is working for is right and just and good.

The suit protects her from the suspicious looks, and it helps her bristle at Percy's subtle insinuations about her relationship with Michael, and helps her wave away Amanda's continued attempts to pry into her subconscious.

The suit keeps her safe, and it keeps her on guard. 

She stands straight and tall beside a seated Amanda, carefully watching Alex conduct her first interrogation. It isn't going particularly well, and Amanda begins to bark orders through the intercom. "Positive incentives aren't working, Alex, maybe it's time to try a negative one?"

Nikita notes, and knows that Amanda does as well, that Alex is extremely reluctant to administer the shock-- the recruit eyes the little controller she has in her hand with skepticism and a little fear. Nikita knows that feeling, but knows that she is going to have to get over that fear sooner rather than later.

"She's a little green for this sort of interrogation." Nikita murmurs quietly, and she hears Percy come in quietly and stand behind her. She glances back at the man, who though she's wearing heels still somehow manages to loom above her. "You don't normally sit in on recruit training."

Percy quirks a single eyebrow at her, but doesn’t seem angry when he says: “Well you were the one who told me she was special. I wanted to see for myself.”

Nikita nods, and returns her attention to the monitors. She watches Alex goad the man -- turning the offer to let him see his family into a barely veiled threat is clever, but no one expects the reaction they get when the man launches himself from the chair, ripping apart the plastic cuffs, and slams Alex into the wall.

Amanda immediately calls the guards for backup, and Nikita turns on her heel, runs out the door and down the hall to the interrogation room. By the time she is there the guards are hauling the terrorist away and Alex is cowering on the floor, clutching at her throat and gasping for air.

“Alex.” She says, and pulls the girl’s hands away so she can inspect the damage, but Alex resists and slaps them away.

“ _Alex_.” She says more forcefully, and grabs her by the jaw, forcing her to make eye contact. “I need to know if you’re hurt.”

The girl is frightened, but drops her hands, and Nikita gently caresses the bruised skin, checking for abraisions, any signs that the wind-pipe had been crushed, anything that could lead to permanent damage... 

“It’s just bruised.” Nikita murmurs, and gently pushes a lock of hair away from Alex’s face. “You’ll be fine.”

“He was crazy, why wasn’t he properly cuffed?” Alex yells, though the timbre of her voice is not quite up to it after the abuse it had just received.

Nikita sees the beginning of a panic attack starting, and she knows that she needs to nip this in the bud before it gets out of hand. “Think, Alex. He couldn’t have metal restraints, not with the electric shock.” And picks up the small remote control that had been dropped in the fracas and returns it to Alex.

“I could’ve been _killed_.” Alex hisses, and seems to be on the verge of tears. Nikita shushes her automatically.

“Hey hey hey.” She says, making firm eye contact with her. “I won’t let that happen to you.” she promises, then lifts the girl to her feet. “Let’s get you to the medical bay.”

She stays with Alex through the exam with the doctor, and when that is done and pain pills are prescribed, she escorts her back to her room to rest. 

“She’ll be fine for the op tomorrow.” She tells Amanda when they reconvene later that evening. “She’s a little shaken, but she’s dealt with worse.”

Amanda nods and adds a brief note to a file on her iPad. “You did a very good job of keeping her calm.” She says lightly, setting aside the tablet to reach for her tea. “Would you like some?”

“Sure.” Nikita says, and settles down in the seat across from the older woman. “She was going to hurt herself more if we weren’t careful.”

“True.” Amanda says, and pours the green tea into the two little ceramic cups, setting the pot back onto its tray. “You’ve grown into a more nurturing figure than I expected you would.” 

Nikita isn’t sure how to respond to that, and she honestly hasn’t noticed the change herself. She accepts the little cup when it’s passed with an: “Oh?”

“Yes.” Amanda says firmly. “Ever since Michael left and you were promoted to help manage the recruits.”

“Well it’s what the role requires, isn’t it.” She reasons, and takes a sip of the tea. It is the perfect temperature, warm enough to fill her chest with heat but not so hot to burn her tongue.

“It’s certainly the way that Michael handled the recruits.” Amanda says, and though her tone is light, and her words are innocent, Nikita knows that there is nothing light and innocent in what Amanda is insinuating and she is suddenly angry she is being questioned and probed and judged in such a manner.

“Oh, well.” Nikita shrugs, calm and composed. “It’s an effective method for building trust, which is more than I can say for thinly veiled interrogations.”

Perhaps it is too far, she thinks, and watches Amanda’s face keenly for even the slightest facial tick or glimpse of emotion that would incriminate her forever.

But Amanda’s poise wins out in the long run, and betrays nothing. Nikita has to satisfy herself with Amanda’s words instead: “I suppose you’re right. Though look where your trust in Michael got you.”

Nikita sets her cup very deliberately back down on the table to keep from throwing it in the other woman’s face.

Amanda gives her the softest of smiles. “He betrayed us all, in the end.”

She doesn’t stay long with Amanda after that, but she doesn’t manage to leave the complex til late in the evening. The single strand of hair she’d wound around the lock on her apartment door is still in place-- she’s had no unwanted visitors today, so when she steps inside and closes the door behind her she finally relaxes.

Slowly, piece by piece, she removes her costume, her armour. She releases her hair from the tight ponytail. The shoes, tall heels for authority, are kicked off into the hall closet. The corseted jacket, now a little wrinkled from wear, is hung across the hamper in the bathroom, and is quickly followed by her blouse and pencil skirt. 

She stands for a moment in her underwear in front of her bathroom mirror and surveys the damage for the day: bags under her eyes betray her exhaustion, knots in her stomach have banished any hunger she should feel, chipped polish from a vigorous session at the firing range...

There is still a small pink blemish of a scar on her left shoulder, just below her clavicle. She presses it with a firm finger, and deep inside the sinew and muscle of the joint she feels the ache that has been there for months, no, for years. For longer than Daniel, even. It’s been there since Michael left, really, and no matter how hard she tries to find him, to help him, to get her revenge, to kill him, to replace him, none of it has come close to healing her of the pain because it all boils down to one thing:

She misses him.

That’s what the costume is really for.

The suit protects her from the suspicious looks, and it helps her bristle at Percy's subtle insinuations about her relationship with Michael, and helps her wave away Amanda's continued attempts to pry into her subconscious.

The suit keeps her safe. It keeps her on guard. 

They run the second part of the interrogation simulation the next day, and when it all goes pear-shaped, and Alex kills her interrogator-- the Division agent playing the part-- it is the pressed suit she wears that reminds her of her role. It helps her bring Alex back into the fold when the hysterical girl is panicking at the gas station and hell-bent on running away forever. It helps her recognise she’s being tested when Percy demands she ‘deal’ with the girl, permanently. And while it doesn’t come to that in the end, the pressed suit helps her cope when she sees that the trust she’s spent so long building with Alex is torn asunder so easily.

It keeps her alive.  
… … …

It’s an innocuous little phone call that changes everything. Owen’s gone, out of the picture for now, tracking down other guardians and other black boxes, and Michael for his part is relishing his return to privacy and solitude. He gets himself back on track, foiling Percy’s foul plans where he can.

He is planning for his next mission, thanks to some info Alex managed to get out to him earlier, when his cell phone buzzes across the table. The display says 'Private Number'.

"Yes?" He says guardedly.

"Hey Mikey. It's Bobby. You told me to give you a call if I heard anything about Kasim Tariq. He's in Uzbekistan."

He moves quickly after that, in less than twenty-four hours he's checked into a hotel in Tashkent, and peeking through the curtains and the hustle and bustle of the street below. He never would've thought this morning that he'd be here, in this place, about to do what he's been planning to do for years. He knows Alex is worried, and rightly so. If things don't go right here, she'll be left without a safety net... But he can't focus on that right now. He sent her a message while he was on the plane, letting her know he'll be off the radar for at least a few days. That'll have to do for now. She's a smart girl, she can lay low for a while without him.

Michael hears a strange noise behind him, and he reacts instantly, unholstering the gun from his hip and whipping around, but the barrel of a silencer is already pointed at his head.

Nikita.

... ... ...

She gets an email with the intel update. Kasim Tariq sighted in Tashkent. Expected to make trade with Russian mob by the end of the week.

There is a P.S. note at the end from Birkhoff: _Nikki. I've fudged your GPS tracker data and I'll cover for you for a few days. Do what you've got to do._

She doesn't waste any time. She hitches a ride on a military transport to Afghanistan and gets a transfer to Uzbekistan within an hour of landing in Kabul. She makes the assumption that Michael would have his own feelers out for intelligence and would've got the same info as her around the same time, but he would be restricted to commercial flights, and so she feels pretty safe in her assumption that she got here first. When she lands she pulls out the netbook Birkhoff furnished her with a while ago, and using the modified version of Shadownet he installed she hacks the local hotels (keeping it to 4 stars and above-- she knows Michael likes a certain level of comfort when he travels) and she finds a booking fitting her description: American. Made less than twelve hours ago. For one night. Cash.

A cab ride later, and after slipping past laughably lax hotel security, she's inside his room. Shadownet tells her the flight he most likely would've taken landed about half an hour ago, and factoring in immigration time, the taxi ride here, she expects she has another twenty minutes or so until Michael gets here himself.

She sits down on the bed, and sets her gun and computer down beside her, ready to wait.

Then her phone rings. It's Birkhoff.

"Yeah?" She asks, quietly.

"Nikki." He says urgently, and instantly she begins to fret, thinking Percy has caught them in their subterfuge, but it is much worse. "Load up the Daniel footage, I think I found something."

"Hold on." She says and wedges her phone between her ear and her shoulder, grabs the netbook and loads the footage as promised. As she does this, a revolution boils in her tummy, tumbling and bubbling and it takes all her self control to push it back down and focus on the task he's given her.

"It's up. What am I looking for?" It begins to play, looking ever the same as usual. Daniel walking casually down the hallway, timestamp ticking over in the corner.

"Pause it at 20:17 at around the 35 second mark." He says, and Nikita navigates to the exact spot and pauses as instructed. Daniel is walking, left hand flexed outwards, his Grandfather's watch peeking out from beneath the sleeve of his pink (real men wear pink) shirt.

"Done. What am I looking at?" She asks. "I don't have much time."

"Yeah, yeah." Birkhoff says quickly. "Zoom in on his watch."

It's a little difficult for her to do with the phone still wedged between her ear and shoulder, but she taps the right command into the program and it blows the image up. At first it is too blurry to see detail, the original footage is not of the highest quality, but the program Birkhoff insists they work with automatically begins cleaning up the image, sharpening the details until she can read the exact time on the watch. 8:31.

"It might be nothing." Birkhoff says quickly, "But the time on the watch says it's a bit after 8:30, which doesn't match the time stamp of the footage."

She can tell Birkhoff thinks he's just grasping at straws but she knows it's the smoking gun they've been looking for. Daniel dutifully wound that watch every day when he got out of the shower. It kept perfect time, in the way that only old, well crafted time pieces could, and he treated it like the treasured possession it was. If it was only a few minutes different to the time stamp she could've waved it away as a subtle discrepancy, but fourteen minutes is telling.

"It's not nothing." She says quietly, and then her ear pricks as she hears the soft bell of the elevator ring at the end of the hall. It will be Michael. “It’s everything.”

“Nikki,” He says, but she knows she won’t have time to hash out her feelings with him on this right now. She hasn’t got the time.

"I've gotta go, Birkhoff. Thanks." 

She hangs up the phone, slips it into her pocket and stashes the netbook in the bathroom, where she hides behind the door and waits. Sure enough, less than a minute later she hears the electronic click of the main door unlock and she can hear the heavy footsteps and measured breathing of a man.

Her mind is whirling with information. The footage had been doctored. She’s suspected it for a little while, but now she has the proof. Michael didn’t kill Daniel. He’s just on the other side of this door, and she has the proof that he didn’t kill the man she loved. He’s here in a foreign country to kill the man who killed his family, and she is here because she knew he would be.

So she steps out of the bathroom, and points her gun at him. He’s on high alert, naturally, and as soon as he hears her move out into the main room, he has a gun trained at her heart, and she can’t help but smile as it’s goddamn deja vu all over again.

"How did you..." He begins.

"Hello Michael." She interrupts, quietly, then lowers the gun.. He darts a glance at the door, then the window, clearly looking for his escape route, and she sighs. “I’m here alone. No one knows where I am.”

It’s a lie, but it’s as true as he needs it to be. No one who wants to hurt him knows where she is.

She watches closely, and sees the tiny little wrinkles form between his eyes. He is puzzled, confused, and then in one, enormous moment he relaxes and lowers the weapon in his hands. “Hello Nikita.” He says, and there is a touch of his old warmth there, just enough to quell the hurricane in her stomach a little.

Nikita nods and allows herself to relax a little in return. “We should talk.” She says.

… … …

They sit on opposite sides of the room, he at the desk, and her on the edge of the bed. She is right, there is so much they need to talk about, but neither of them seems to know just where to start. There is a veritable mountain of complexity before them and there are so many things they could begin with.

Michael opens his mouth to tell her what he learned from Owen, that he had been framed, that he didn’t kill Daniel, that he would never hurt her like that, he would never inflict this pain on someone else. But she speaks before he gets the chance.

“Did you kill Daniel?” She asks, and it is so straight forward and devoid of emotion that he is at first a little surprised.

“ _No_.” He says unequivocally. “No. I didn’t kill him.”

“Were you there that night to kill him?” She asks.

“No.”

“What were you doing there?”

He pauses for a moment to remember. Then he explains: “I had evidence of an undercover division agent who had a connection to him and wanted to know why. I thought he was your target, that he had some intelligence or connection Division wanted to exploit.”

Nikita is quiet for a moment, and he can see that she is slotting this new information into her understanding of everything. He can see the toll this life has had on her, the bags beneath her eyes, she looks skinnier than she’s ever been, and it’s as though there is a heavy burden weighing on her shoulders. She looks much older than her twenty seven years, and it kills him to know he was inadvertently the cause of such toxic stress.

“He was just a graphic designer.” Nikita says finally, and he can hear a tremble in her voice. 

“I know.” He says, and leans forward. “It didn’t make any sense to me at the time. When I was there in the apartment I found some Division bugs, but there wasn’t any reason. He had no security connections, no terrorist connections. No access to money or information. I was in the middle of my search when the Cleaner turned up. We fought and I shot him in the shoulder and I managed to get away before Daniel got home. I assumed the Cleaner was there for me, until I read he died in the paper.”

He wants nothing more than to reach out to her and comfort her, she’s not crying, but she is clearly upset and it pains him to know that he has been the root of so much of the sadness in her life. Even if it was all a lie.

“I was out of town that night, I was part of a smash and grab team in New York. It was simple work, but when you left they promoted me to recruit supervision so I was leading the raid. I got home so early in the morning, I didn’t have any time to sleep, but I went over to Daniel’s place anyway because I knew I could get breakfast there and he’d let me sleep on his couch all day and watch reruns of Friends and then when he got home from work that evening he’d watch it with me. 

Instead I got to his place and the door was closed but it wasn’t locked. Furniture was everywhere, and then I got to the living room and he was dead on the floor next to the coffee table.” He sees a tiny tear roll down her cheek, and she doesn't wipe it away. "The first person I called was Percy, can you believe that? He was number one on my speed dial. I call him and I tell him what happened, and I don't remember much after that until I woke up in Birkhoff's office on his couch and they show me this footage of Daniel coming home, and then you running down the same corridor five minutes later with a blood splatter across your cheek. And then there is DNA evidence proving you were in his apartment... And they tell me you killed him and I believed them because what else could I do? I hated you _so much_ , Michael. They played me and I believed them and I hated you."

She buries her face in her hands, and Michael can't stand it any longer. He is by her side immediately, pulling her hands away from her face and pulling her into a hug. She puts up little resistance, and soon enough she is sobbing into his shirt, and he can't help but think to himself that this is all his fault. He left and left her behind with no one to protect her. She was played because she had no one in her corner looking out for her interests, and ultimately she was hurt because she dared to love somebody. He softly shushes her, and she clings more tightly to him than even Haylee ever did. 

"I'm sorry, Nikki." He says. "I left you to them, I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry."


	4. Cast Some Light

_Disturbing silence darkens your sight, we’ll cast some light you’ll be alright_

… … …

Nikita wakes up slowly, feeling warm and comfortable, though more than a little disoriented, and... hungry? She pushes herself up from the pillows and surveys the room, and as she does she remembers she is in Tashkent, and that this is Michael’s hotel room, and she remembers her breakdown the previous night. What she doesn’t remember is falling asleep. Or taking off her shoes and pants (though her underwear is still firmly in place). Despite all this, she doesn’t feel violated. 

She feels safe.

Through the bathroom door she hears water flowing, a flushing toilet, then a few seconds later the pipes grind as the tap is turned on and off.

She slowly sits up in the bed, pushing against the pillows until she’s upright. Michael emerges from the bathroom seconds later. He notices her immediately.

“You’re awake.” He says, with a tiny smile, “You want breakfast?” and he gestures to the desk, where a room service platter is set out with coffee pots, fresh toast, jam, butter and fruit. Her tummy grumbles again, and she nods, and pushes the blankets away.

“No no!” Michael says, putting a hand up. “You stay there, I’ll get it for you.”

“Breakfast in bed?” She asks, and wipes her eyes with the balls of her hands, trying to freshen herself up. “This really is a 5 star establishment.”

Michael fills a mug with the freshly brewed coffee, and half a teaspoon of sugar. He slips two slices of toast onto a plate along with a dollop of jam and butter and he delivers it to her in bed. He sits down on the edge of the bed, careful to avoid sitting on her. “We all deserve a little luxury every now and then.”

She takes a sip of the coffee, and it is good coffee, not bitter or burnt, and it warms her to the core. “Thank you, for last night.” She says, setting the coffee down on the bedside table. “I didn’t mean to...” 

He cuts her off before she finishes her apology. “No, no, no, Nikki, no.” He says emphatically, and grasps her hand. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I never wanted you to go through that, to go through what I’ve gone through.”

And just like that, she remembers why they’re both here in the first place. “Kasim Tariq is here.” She says suddenly, and Michael sighs.

“I know.” He says, and shifts a little to the side. “I was going to start tracking him last night, but then we got sidetracked. The trail is probably cold now.”

“No.” Nikita says firmly, and pushes herself out of bed, handing the plate and untouched toast back to him. “We have to get him.”

Michael moves a little to the side and frowns. “We?”

She shoots a little glare over her shoulder, and retrieves her netbook from the table and holds it up for him to see. “We have Birkhoff to help us.”

“Birkhoff isn’t here.” Michael says, and Nikita ignores it. 

“He’s been helping me find you.” Nikita reveals flatly, “And I would’ve never figured out your innocence if not for him either. Plus, I’m much friendlier than you and it comes with some rewards.” She sits back down next to Michael on the bed and opens the netbook. The Shadownet program takes a few minutes to launch, but the soon enough the interface is there and ready for them to use. She launches Kasim Tariq’s intelligence profile and immediately brings up his known Uzbek contacts, but Michael is tense beside her, still holding the toast in his hands. “Welcome to Shadownet 2.0, the portable version.”

“Nikita.” He says cautiously, fingering the keyboard with the edge of his nail. “I’m fine working with you, but Birkoff is still back in Division, and last I saw he was firmly under Percy’s thumb.”

Nikita quirks an eyebrow. “Well, he wasn’t very happy about your foray into dentistry, that’s for sure. But you don’t have to worry about him, I promise.”

“You trust him?”

She hesitates a moment, then decides to go with the truth. “I trust him with my life, Michael. I’m trusting him right now, he knows where I am and is hiding me from Percy.”

Nikita watches the way he tenses, though it’s almost imperceptible, and she knows that his wariness comes from years of necessary paranoia. She knows that if the positions were reversed, she’d have trouble trusting too. But then he says something that warms her better than the coffee ever could: “He’s not the only one anymore. I promise.”

She’s not sure what to say to that, how she should respond, and she knows that Michael understands that-- the blush on her cheeks probably gives it away. She wants to cherish this feeling though, that much she knows, because she knows it’s only a matter of time until this bubble they’re in is popped, and everything will go back to being the same brand of nasty and vicious she’s been coping with her entire life.

Instead, she decides to control where she goes from here, instead of letting her life control her. She is going to make decisions for herself from now on. And her first is this: She will help Michael kill Kasim. 

She types a few simple commands into ShadowNet and Kasim’s list of known contacts is cross-referenced against the hotel records she’d hacked the night before, looking for any common pseudonyms and aliases. “Here.” She says, and pushes the computer into Michael’s hands. “This should make our lives easier.”

Sure enough, Shadownet has found the common denominator between the two, and spits out the name of their most likely target. Against all odds he’s even staying at the same hotel. Nikita can barely believe their luck, and if Michael’s eyebrows are any indication, he is also suitably impressed.

“We can work with this.” He says, and nods, and she pushes herself out of bed to help lay out their plan of attack.

It doesn’t take them long to decide what to do. It’s easier with two people, Nikita will play the honey trap angle, distracting the client for a while, and hopefully lifting his phone to copy the sim, while Michael sticks to good old fashioned espionage, sifting through the man’s hotel room to see if there is any worthwhile intel in there. They figure between the two they’ll be able to find the meeting place and time, hopefully with enough time to spare to scout out the final destination, or worst case scenario and they don’t find the info they need, they can plant a tracker in amongst the man’s things, and follow him at a discrete distance.

Their initial plan works as well as they could hope, with Nikita flirting her way through a casual lunch encounter. She distracts the man from his oysters and his vodka with her charming laugh and a low cut dress. Michael is able to get in and out of the man’s rather messy bedroom with more than enough detail about the meet for them to plan a mission around it, though they will be running rather short on time; the meet is scheduled for 4pm, and by the time Nikita gets away from the drunk Russian man it’s 1pm already.

They pile all the gear they’ll need into a hire car, and speed off as quickly as they can manage without attracting unwanted attention. On the drive there, while Nikita surveys the topographical maps for their best vantage spot, and Nikita marvels to herself just how seamlessly they have returned to working in unison, anticipating the other’s actions, speaking in shorthand-- it’s the quickest mission she’s planned in years, but she knows it’s probably one of the most flawless in its simplicity.

“I have a mole in Division.” Michael says bluntly, and it is surprising enough to distract Nikita from the map she has spread across the dash and her reflective thoughts of the tenacity of their working relationship.

She blinks at him, owlishly. “Huh?”

He looks a little sheepish and apologetic, but doesn’t hold back his explanation. “That’s how I’ve been keeping ahead of you these past few months. I have someone on the inside who feeds me info, and I use it to sabotage Division ops. Sometimes she helps too.”

“You turned a Division operative?” She asks, putting the map to the side to stare at him some more. How had she not noticed? Now he’s told her, of course it makes sense, his sudden reappearance. She puts herself in his shoes: if she had been on the run, it would be nigh impossible to anticipate Division’s next move unless you had insider info. She just can’t think who it could possibly be-- he’d never been that close to anyone within Division that she’d seen-- well, other than her, of course.

“No, I didn’t turn anyone.” Michael says, “I got one recruited.”

That is even more astounding to her, and she can’t believe he’d gone to such an enormous risk. “Who?” She asks.

“Alex.” Michael says. “I found her on the streets, I recognised her from an op from years ago, we killed her family. She was meant to have been killed as well, but the operative must’ve spared her.”

And then it hits her like a freight train, all the niggling little details, “Alex.” She mutters, testing the name out in her head, and then anger bubbles up in her, barely controllable. “I can’t believe you would let her do that! Do you know how close we’ve come to cancelling her? Do you know how much I risked to get her out that night?” She hits Michael hard in the arm, and he grimaces but he doesn’t retaliate.

“It wasn’t my original plan. When I found her, she was so spun out on drugs I was just focused on getting her clean, and by the time that happened she’d figured out a bit about my work, what I was trying to do. ” Michael says defensively. “She is _so_ smart, Nikita. She knows the implications, but she’s doing it anyway.”

Nikita is not convinced, but it is an argument for another time, as they arrive at their destination and unpack their gear in silence. They still have quite a fair trek through the woods til they’ll be at the right vantage position. “I don’t think you understand how much Division has changed since you left.” She mutters as she hefts the sniper case out of the trunk of the car and hands it to Michael.

“It’s not just me and her anymore, Nikki.” He says, slipping his sig into the back of his pants, careful to make sure the safety is on. “We have Owen, one of the guardians on our side. And we have one of Percy’s black boxes.”

It’s not exactly new information to her, but she tries her best to consider how those two things improve the situation. From what she has learned of him through Division’s records, Owen is a formidable enough ally, but like Michael he hasn’t been within the fold of central Division in years, she doubts he has much to contribute in that way. And while having a black box is definitely leverage, there are still 5 others out there they’d need before they could do anything and without someone of Birkhoff’s calibre helping them they wouldn’t be able to get past the encryption to get any usable data.

“Well I’ll be sure to look out for her when I go back.” Nikita says firmly, and forcefully shuts the trunk of the car. Perhaps you could say she slams it. Either way it gets Michael’s attention.

He stops in his trek up the incline. “You can’t stay there in Division, it’s too poisonous.” He says to her bluntly.

Nikita takes a deep breath and holds off on rolling her eyes at his overprotectiveness. “I’m better help to you in Division than I am out, Michael.” She begins ticking things off on her fingers one by one: “I have higher level access than Alex, I’m better trained, better equipped, I have better connections and allies and I’m much better at the politics. Most importantly we can _cement_ my loyalty to Percy right now.”

Michael frowns again, not following, and she grasps his hand firmly and tugs him up the hill. If they don’t keep moving they’ll never get Kasim. They begin walking in step together. “You can betray me here. Frame me for Kasim’s death. Leave me for dead, double cross me. I’ll go back to Percy hating you more than ever, with any doubts I had before eradicated for good. He’ll believe my trust and faith in him and his cause has grown.” She explains passionately, acutely aware of Michael’s reluctance. She pulls out the big guns.

“Alex hasn’t covered all her tracks, Michael. I think Amanda has suspected a mole for a while now, and in retrospect it makes a whole lot of things make sense. But if I’m in there too I can protect her. If I’m not, it’ll only be a matter of time before she slips up and is caught, and you can’t protect her from outside. If I’m there, I can.”

“But then you’ll both be in there, and I won’t be able to protect either of you.”

“I’ve dealt pretty well these past five years without your protection.” She says, and pointedly presses her free hand to the scar on her shoulder. He grimaces and reaches out to grasp her other hand. She squeezes it tightly. “I’ll be fine.”

… … …

Michael is still uncertain about Nikita's plan, but she is so adamant in wanting to help and even he can see that there is merit in it. Giving Alex a little bit more protection within Division certainly is appealing. He swings wildly between hating the idea and grudging acceptance of it, but he does his best to put it to the side while they go after Kasim at the mansion, figuring that they can argue more about it later, after their first mission is behind them.

But of course it doesn't work like that, and Kasim gets away, and Nikita is captured and dragged away by the man who ruined his life so many years ago. 

It takes him hours to track her down, and it's only when he goes against his better judgement and uses Shadownet 2.0 to contact the only other person he thinks would be able to help.

Luckily it connects, and Birkhoff is at his computer. "Didn't expect you on the other end of the line," Is the first thing he says, and Michael can't help but notice the way his old friend has aged in the months since he last grabbed him; the suspicious look on the man’s face doesn’t help much.

"Kasim has Nikki." He says, cutting the small-talk off before it begins. "She told me you've been blocking her tracking signal. I need you to stop so I can find her."

"I don't know if that's a good idea." Birkhoff says, "Percy will see."

"Don't worry about that right now." He says. "We'll figure that out later."

Birkhoff still seems reluctant, but he still types a few commands and in the bottom corner of the netbook screen a little map appears, but no signal appears to be online in the area. "Looks like her tracker signal is out of range, she's probably underground."

“Dammit.” Michael kicks the side of the bed in frustration, and runs a hand through his hair. "Can we enhance it, anything?"

He watches Birkhoff frantically type, and then a little red dot appears on the map. Michael’s heart jumps, but Birkhoff is quick to clarify: "This is the last movements it recorded."

“If we find out where we lost the signal it’ll at least narrow it down.”

“Is she alright, Mikey?” Birkhoff asks quietly, as they both watch the progress of the signal travel through the heart of Tashkent, before cutting out in a nearby industrial area.

“I hope so.” He says, and starts collecting his things, his gun, his spare, a few extra rounds, a communicator-- his knife is still in his boot. 

“Is there anything I can do?” The technician asks, and Michael returns his attention back to the computer.

“From what I hear you’ve already done a lot for me.” He says calmly. “I should thank you for that.”

“Go get her back, Mikey. That’s all I want.” Michael tries to think of a reply that conveys the gratitude he feels, but swallows his words. There is nothing he can say right now that could cover it, especially over a tenuous internet connection. So he nods quickly at his old friend, and maybe ally, and shuts the netbook computer.

Michael doesn’t waste another moment. With the GPS coordinates programmed into his phone, and a liberated Suzuki hatchback, he speeds as quickly as he can to the place Birkhoff indicated, and sure enough, parked just outside an old, decrepit warehouse is the car that Kasim and his men escaped in with Nikita unconscious in the back seat. He pulls up behind the car and the engine is barely off when he opens the door and jumps out.

A warehouse like this probably has a basement, which is probably where they’re holding Nikita. He doesn’t have time to plan the extraction too carefully, so instead of doing a full perimeter search like he would prefer, he decides to take a leap from Nikita’s audacious playbook and use the front door.

It’s unlocked, pushes easily open, and no one starts shooting at him. He opens it further and steps inside. It is an open-plan factory floor, and it is completely empty. From the old stains on the concrete and the air of long-dead things, he figures this used to be an abattoir of some description, and there are drains built into the floor in a fairly regular pattern that support that theory. Downstairs would’ve been the freezers, though they’re most-likely out of action at the moment, given there is no power running to the building-- the only light is ambient and comes streaming through the high-set windows. There is only one other door, directly across from him, and he heads straight towards it, moving as stealthily as possible and he presses an ear to the door once he gets there.

He hears someone breathing on the other side.

It’s now or never.

Michael flings the door open, and sure enough he sees one of Kasim’s bodyguards standing directly opposite. He fires a shot between the man’s eyes before he even has a chance to raise his own gun, but Michael doesn’t savour the moment. Anyone else in the building would’ve heard that shot, and he doesn’t have the element of surprise any longer. He has to move fast.

He strips the man of his gun-- an automatic hand-gun and turns it down the stairs, where he can hear the heavy footfalls of two people ascending. He takes cover behind a desk, and when the two men round the corner he fires off a volley of bullets, spraying the wall and the men equally. They slump to the floor, and Michael launches over the desk, past them and down the stairs.

He finds himself standing at the beginning of a long corridor, with a few doors leading off on either side, and at the end, a door with a large, unlit EXIT sign above. That door swings wildly on its hinges, as though someone had only recently kicked it open, and for a second Michael is torn. Kasim probably just left through that door, and Michael has an automatic weapon in his hands. It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel, he’ll finally have his revenge.

But he’s here for Nikita.

He ducks into the closest open room, and she is there, tied to a plastic exam table, drenched from head to toe. She looks pale, her lip is split, and her left eye is swollen and bruised, but her chest steadily rises and falls, and she groans and twists her head to look at him. “Michael?”

Michael drops his gun, pulls his knife from his boot and begins hacking away at her restraints, first her feet, then her hands, and gently helps her sit up.

“He’s getting away.” She says with a cough. “We need to get him, Michael.” She insists, and points at the door.

But he shakes his head. “No,” and tries to get her to stop squirming so he can assess how bad the injury to her eye is.

“This is our opportunity.” She insists, and pushes his hand away. “He’s going to the airport. I can go after him and kill him there. The Uzbek police will catch me, Percy will have to extract me. I’ll blame it all on you, I’ll tell him you set me up, you lied to me. I thought you’d made a mistake with Daniel, but you only said that to get me on your side to feed me to the wolves. ”

Michael grimaces, every bone in his body screams this is a bad idea, that there are so many ways this plan could go wrong. All he wants right now is to get her back to the hotel room and clean her up, he wants to tuck her into bed, and shield her from harm, and all she wants to do is to throw herself directly in its path. “Nikki, I don’t need you to do that.” He insists. “You can get out now. It’s safer that way, for everyone.”

“I don’t want to be _safe_ , Michael.” She hisses. “I want this to end. And if you let me work with you we can end this forever.”

She takes his hand in hers and uses it as leverage to stand. She wobbles a bit, and he immediately begins to worry about a concussion or something, but when she lets go of his hand, she seems as steady as ever, standing straight and tall and exuding the confidence he’d always admired so much.

He stands. “Alright.” He says. “Let’s go.”

… … …

Michael reluctantly drops her at the arrivals drop-off point, with his own jacket draped around her shoulders, and instead of torturously extending their goodbyes out, she takes his hand and drops a simple but heartfelt kiss between his knuckles. “I’ll do this for you” she says, “and all this will be over.”

He squeezes her hand and lingers, for a moment, between pulling her closer and letting her go. For a split second she wonders if he is going to kiss her, his eyes definitely dart to her lips and back, but all he says is “Good luck.” and once she’s out on the curb, he drives off without looking back.

Her plan to get Kasim in the airport works perfectly. She buys her ticket for Syria using Division’s credit card. Birkhoff won’t be able to hide that, but they don’t want him to. Declaring her subterfuge to Percy will mask the bigger one hiding beneath. She gets through immigration and security quickly, though the bruises and split lip get her some odd looks. She explains in intentionally broken Russian to one of the guards that she’d “had accident. car no see me,” and it’s enough to see her through.

She gets all the materials she needs from the Duty Free, a vodka bottle, a wide purple cashmere scarf to use as a makeshift hijab, and a ‘Welcome to Uzbekistan’ magnet she’ll give to Birkhoff later. The scarf she puts on in the bathroom, and when she’s alone in the woman’s bathroom, she smashes the bottle and sifts through the glass shards for the best one to use as a shiv.

Nikita pulls the sleeves of Michael’s jacket further down to cover her hands, and slips the best shard inside, careful not to cut her wrists. The rest she tosses away, or washes down the sink as best she can, and then heads towards the gate. If she’s calculated right they’ll be boarding any minute, and hopefully she’ll be able to use the element of surprise to her advantage.

Sure enough, she reaches the gate just as they open the gates. It mustn't be a packed flight, as when she gets to the end of the line, she is only three or four people behind Kasim, who hasn't noticed her yet. She hands her passport and ticket to the flight attendant who checks her in, and Nikita carelessly shoves the documents back into the pockets of Michael's jacket.

Now is her chance to make her move, while they exit the terminal and walk along the tarmac to the plane. She pushes past the other passengers, and slips the large shard of glass from her sleeve, gripping it tightly in her fist. He is just ahead of her, two people away, one.

She reaches out and when they are only a few meters from the adjustable stairs that lead to the jet, she grasps Kasim's shoulder firmly, and shoves the shard of glass hard between his ribs, burying it deep in his side.

Someone grabs her roughly and pulls her off, and Kasim lets out a sick gurgling noise, but she knows the damage is done. People around her are yelling in Uzbek and Russian and someone hits her hard in the side of the head and it all goes black.

 

The next day or so goes exactly how she anticipates. First there is the rough interrogation by the Uzbek officials. Then there is the solitary confinement in a squalid jail cell, complete with overflowing toilet and lice-ridden mattress. But predictably enough, within twenty four hours, the cell door opens, and perfectly polished Italian loafers step into the room.

"You're in quite a lot of trouble." Percy says, stopping in the middle of the room to look down upon her, where she is curled on the floor as far away from the toilet as possible

She lets out a deep breath and looks up at the man. It is not difficult for her to act convincingly; Tariq hadn’t been gentle with her and the Uzbek police were not exactly restrained in their methods of interrogation, and she knows she looks bad. She can’t see out of her left eye and the taste of blood has been in her mouth for several hours now. 

"I'm sorry." She croaks. "I made a huge mistake, Percy. I'm sorry."

The man sighs, and leans down to pick her up from the ground. The cry of pain she lets out is genuine when she tries to put weight on her right knee. She grasps Percy’s forearm for support. Percy says, and he guides her forward a few steps towards the cell door. “This extraction wasn’t easy.”

“I know. He tricked me.” She says, and a tear rolls down her face. “I thought it was an accident. That he hadn’t known about Daniel, but... He knew. He’s crazy, he’s lost it.”

Percy nods. “And now Kasim Tariq is dead, Michael got what he wanted all along.”

She limps a few steps slowly forward, and he doesn’t rush her.

“Let’s get you home, Nikita.” He says.

… … …

When he arrives home to the penthouse, the first thing he finds is an email in his inbox confirming the death of Kasim Tariq. Then there are the redacted news reports about the woman the Uzbek officials captured in connection to the murder, and the destroyed official records detailing Nikita’s arrest and release. 

The second thing is a series of messages from Alex, asking where he is, reporting Nikita’s walk of shame, the rumours about his double-crossing her, her injuries, the bounce in Percy’s step.

He shoots a quick message back to Alex, seeing she is still online: _Am home. Mission didn’t go as planned._

She replies almost instantly: _What happened with Nikita? They told us you did it to her. She looked horrible._

Michael is torn. He is not sure how much to tell her, on one hand he wants to keep Alex as in-the-loop as possible, the more she knows, the better she can protect herself, but on the other hand it is just another thing she’d have to lie about if she were caught and plausible deniability can go a long way, especially with Amanda and her lie-detectors. He decides to put his faith in Nikita. Alex will just have to understand. _I did what I had to do to keep her safe._ he sends, before quickly claiming jet-lag and logging off, not wanting to field any more questions for now. For now he needs to sleep.

Or at least he needs to try.

… … …

“I don’t want to talk about it, Nerd.” Nikita says, but there is no affection there, she is tired, and she is cranky, and she is in pain, and most of all, she can’t tell Birkhoff this secret, no matter how much she wants to.

Seymour unlocks her door for her and takes her bags inside. “I want the full story, Nikki.” He hisses as she maneuvers her crutches through the door, careful not to knock her busted knee against anything as she closes it behind her.

Nikita glares and brings a hand up to her lips in a Shhh gesture. 

Birkhoff rolls his eyes, but takes her bags into her room. Nikita knows that he is on his last nerve with all this and his patience with her will not last much longer.

She sets that aside for now and surveys the apartment. It feels like she’s been gone for weeks, though in reality she was eating breakfast in her underwear here four days ago. It’s like her whole world has been tilted off its axis, and nothing quite feels normal anymore.

That being said, she doesn’t put it past Percy or Amanda or the like to have not visited during her short time away. She’s even going to _consider_ telling Birkhoff so much as the quality of the airline food until she has pulled this place apart for bugs and cameras, and that won’t be happening ‘til the ligament in her knee starts pulling its weight again. She’s booked in for keyhole surgery later in the week anyway, so even if she could pull the place apart today, she’d have to do it again in another week or so.

Birkhoff comes back into the hall. “I’ve put a load of washing on, and I’ll get you some milk from the store in a bit so you won’t have to go out later and you can just rest up, and for god’s sake just _tell me what happened_.” He snaps, and she is taken aback. Nikita knows that Birkhoff has more sense than this.

Birkhoff pulls a black remote with a solid antenna from his pocket and points an angry finger at it. “Signal jammer made by a signals expert. Nothing is getting in or out of here.” He says fiercely, and Nikita has the good sense to feel a little guilty. She should’ve known he’d take precautions, and that he could protect them both from the sort of paranoia she’s been living with on a daily basis. She wishes she had asked for one earlier. “Now spill, Nikki. You’re not the only one taking heat about this.”

She limps over to stool on the other side of her kitchen bench and settles herself gingerly into it. She props the set of crutches against the bench and gestures for Birkhoff to take the one opposite. She is tired, and she figures this conversation is going to take a little while, and she honestly cannot keep standing much longer, not without some more of those painkillers the doctor gave her.

“I can’t tell you everything.” She says bluntly, “And it’s not because I don’t trust you, I do. I just want you to have plausible deniability if anything goes wrong.”

For a moment, Birkhoff looks like he wants to argue the point, and Nikita can see the internal struggle cross his face before he takes a seat on the stool and resentfully says: “Fine.”

“Firstly. You were right about him. He didn’t kill Daniel.” She says calmly. “I think we can safely assume we know who ordered that.”

“Percy.” Birkhoff supplies. Nikita nods.

“Or Amanda, but he knew either way. Michael and I have a plan. He didn’t double-cross me in Uzbekistan, or set me up. It was my idea to go in there, take Tariq out at the airport.”

Birkhoff flinches, and it is a strange comfort for her to believe that someone in her life values her well-being as much as he does. “What you did was practically suicide,” He says, and she shrugs. “It’s amazing they didn’t kill you on the spot.”

“I knew it was a gamble, but it worked.” She said. “It helped me cement my loyalty with Percy. I’ve told him I coerced you into covering for me, and then that Michael manipulated me into killing Kasim by convincing me he had nothing to do with Daniel’s death. He told me he had a way to kill Kasim but he needed my help, that he’d be covering my six the entire time, and that he’d extract me when the job was done, but when I killed him he left me there to take the fall with the Uzbek officials. I told Percy that he’d changed, that this fight has turned him, he’s gone mad.” Her lip quivers a bit, and her voice wavers as she gets caught up in the emotion of her fake excuse to Percy.

Birkhoff smirks a little, and Nikita blinks away the crocodile tears.

“The story fits with what Percy knows, and Michael is going to release some information from the Black Box in the next week or so. Old Michael wouldn’t put that info out there, it’s too dangerous and too many innocent people could get hurt, but it’ll sell the story we need: That he’s mad, that I’m more loyal than ever and completely on Percy’s side. Percy, meanwhile, thinks he’s got the upper-hand in the fight, when we hold all the cards.”

There is silence for a moment or two. Birkhoff nods, and seems to be taking the time to process all this, and Nikita is happy to let him. Better he thinks it through now, than second-guesses himself later. Then Birkhoff says something that surprises her: “You know, Nikki. I could decrypt that Black Box for you.” 

“What?” She blinks, dumbly.

“After the first one was stolen, Percy had me upgrade the remaining hardware to remove a flaw in the system.” He swallows and avoids eye contact for a moment, and Nikita is sure that there is a part to the story he is not sharing. She doesn’t push the matter though. “And I know where the remaining six boxes are.”

There is a few moments of silence, as Nikita processes the enormity of just what Birkhoff is offering her. Them. “Are you sure?” She asks quietly. “This is such a precarious thing, Seymour. The last thing I want is for you to get caught up and get hurt.”

His eyes flick to her knee, in its brace, and the dark bruises that mottle her face. But to his credit, he looks her in the eye and says without hesitation: “I’m on your side, Nikki.” He says fiercely. “Whatever side you’re on, that’s my side.”

Nikita pulls him into a strong hug straight away and ignores her protesting knee. Friendship like this is worth the pain.

… … …  
It doesn’t take much to convince Owen to release a file or two from the update drive. Michael barely suggests the plan to him and the Guardian arrives on his doorstep looking (and smelling) like someone who lost a fight with a dumpster. Before Michael has a chance to say hello, how’s things, he’s already whipping the thing out from a pocket (he was just carrying it around with him? Is he crazy?) and anonymously emailing incendiary evidence off to all the major news outlets.

“Should I ask what changed your mind?” Owen asks, and Michael isn’t sure what to make of the maniacal glint in the man’s eye. He certainly doesn’t find it comforting. The smell isn’t endearing either.

“I turned another Division operative.” Michael says. “We have a plan, that was part of sealing the cover story.”

Owen raises an eyebrow. “Who, you mean Nikita?”

Michael flinches, and Owen rolls his eyes and pulls his thumb drive out of the USB slot and slips it back into his pocket. “Please, I’m not an idiot. I can connect the dots.”

Michael knows that Owen is baiting him, but he doesn’t really have the patience for mind games right now. If Owen saw through their subterfuge, maybe Percy will too-- Maybe Nikita isn’t as safe and as thorough as they thought. “What dots?” He demands.

Owen, to his credit, seems to sense the change in tone fairly easily and reacts accordingly, raising his hands to calm him. “Relax. I figured once I told you about Daniel and all it’d only be a matter of time until you flipped her.”

Tension still thrums beneath his skin, but the dull ache of dread that filled something low in his stomach fades a little. His heart is still thumping hard against his ribs though, and not for the first time Michael wonders were in hell Owen gets off scaring the shit out of him like this. “That’s it? Nothing else?”

“Not that I’ve seen, no.” Owen shakes his head and stands, hands buried deep in his pockets. “But I promise if I get wind of anything, you’ll be the first one I call.”

Michael nods, and forces himself to relax a little. There are other things he can focus on right now, things that will distract him from the panic attack he just narrowly avoided. Having all these new allies in his fight against Percy and Division should be making his life easier. Instead he feels like he now has a posse of people in his care and he can’t protect all of them. Something’s gonna give one day and he won’t be able to forgive himself if anything happens.

He takes a deep, calming breath and reminds himself that every one of his allies can protect themselves, in some capacity or another. They all volunteered to help him, they all knew the risks. He may feel responsible for them, but they can be responsible for themselves as well, and not one of them would just _let_ him shoulder all this by himself.

“Hey,” Owen says loudly, cutting into his reverie. “Can I use your shower?”

… … …

Her surgery goes well, apparently the damage to her ligament was not as extensive as the doctors thought, and within a few weeks she’s up and walking without a brace or crutches. It’s not steady enough to jog or run on yet, but she studiously keeps up her exercises and every day the limb feels stronger.

The bruises fade as well, and her wounds scar and fade under the guidance of specialist doctors and with the application of many topical creams and several helpful makeup tips from Amanda.

The rehabilitation time is not time idly spent though, and she finds herself thrust straight back into recruitment training, which is just where she’d prefer to be right now anyway. She looks forward to the day that she can actively interfere with Percy’s plans and bring the asshole to his knees, but for now she remains the perfect soldier, shaping the new generation to be just like her.

Not to mention the fact that it gives her a chance to keep a closer eye on her fellow mole. Now that she knows who has been the cause of Division’s worries of late, she knows what to look for, what to hide, and what to reveal, and when to come down hard on Alex to stop her from doing something hideously stupid. The girl is incredibly nosy, and while the other trainers and Amanda see it as a misguided form of ingenuity, Nikita sees it for what it is: sloppy, impulsive, unnecessary decisions, all made in service of Michael, one of the most careful, precise men Nikita has ever worked with. She can’t help but feel that if Michael was here on the inside, he’d probably have some concerns.

So she comes down hard on the girl, dishing out punishments for the slightest behavioural infractions and though she makes an effort to be equally as harsh to the other recruits, she knows her prejudice does not go unnoticed, though thankfully Amanda deems her motives to be a projection, fuelled by a deep-seated mix of rage and depression that was brought on by Michael’s betrayal. Nikita plays into the assumption by destroying one of Amanda’s china tea-sets and storming out of her office in a teary, violent tirade. She takes refuge in Birkhoff’s den.

“Don’t you think that was a bit over the top?” He asks, pushing a mug of steaming black coffee into her hands.

She glares at him, but takes the coffee, and the next day is business as usual.

Some of the older recruits make agent status, Thom, Robbie, and soon enough, despite Nikita’s campaign of punishment, Alex becomes a candidate for promotion. The mark has been picked, the hit planned and arranged. Amanda begins the task of grooming the girl, physically and psychologically, for the task at hand, but it is up to Nikita to give Alex the details.

She carries the mission brief in a simple manilla folder when she is called down to Amanda’s office to begin the briefing. She walks carefully, her knee is still a little unsteady, having only upgraded to a low heel the day before. Alex is twirling disinterestedly in a maroon dress, shifting awkwardly from one foot to another, and the girl sends a glare in her direction when she steps in.

Amanda doesn’t miss a thing, but does not comment. “Nikita. What do we think?” She asks instead, and gestures to the ensemble, then the two alternate outfits that hang on a rack nearby.

Nikita turns a critical eye on Alex, then steps over to examine the other outfits. There is a very similar blue one on the rack that has pockets. “She looks fine in that, she’ll blend in well. But this one has pockets-- easier to conceal the weapon. And you won’t want this one strapped to your leg or hidden in your cleavage.”

“Weapon?” Alex asks, perking up. 

“We haven’t discussed the mission yet, Nikita.” Amanda says lightly, and Nikita nods, since it is her job to officially turn these children into murderers, of course the honour is left to her.

“I imagine Alex is smart enough to have made the leap though,” Nikita replies, but keeps her gaze on Alex rather than Amanda. “She’s been here long enough to know how these things work.”

“I have to kill someone to become an agent.” Alex says, and there is something in her tone that rings of an oft-repeated mantra, something the girl says at night in order to come to terms with a difficult truth.

"Yes," Nikita says with a nod, and hands the manilla folder over to the recruit for her to peruse at her leisure. "The target's name is Zoman, head of one of the crime syndicates that sells weapons to terrorists." 

She and Amanda give the girl a few moments to peruse the mission documents in silence, both women understanding how important it is for her to grasp the essential details, and to process what they're ordering her to do. But Nikita also sees the way that the recruit’s hands tremble ever so slightly, and the way that the blood drains from her face. It is not good.

But as much as she would like to, Nikita has her own role to play, and this is not the time to be nurturing. "This man is not a good man." She adds lightly, once Alex has finished reading.

"And of course, you'll have support on the ground."

Nikita nods, "I'll be there to monitor everything on the day, and we have Thom and a few other junior agents placed within the catering staff for support. All the details have been sorted, it's just up to you to carry it out for us."

"See, we don't just send you into these sorts of things alone, Alex." Amanda says warmly, and to see the way that she mothers this girl repulses Nikita a little. To her credit, Alex doesn’t seem much comforted either.

"Speaking of, I'll need you down in the training area later and we'll go through the finer details of what you'll need to do." Nikita says briskly, covering up her reaction with the same business-like detachment she has relied upon for so long. "Amanda, I trust you'll go through the finer details with her in the meantime?"

Amanda acquiesces with a smile, and Nikita leaves the room knowing two things. One: That Alex will not be able to kill that man and two: that she should not have to.

The problem is, of course, that if the girl doesn't do it, she'll either blow her cover or be cancelled before the day is out. Not for the first time, Nikita marvels that Michael let this girl volunteer for such an awful mission, one that would no doubt change her completely. You can't go back, once you've killed someone, and not everyone can cope with it. Division is remarkably pragmatic about that, cancellations are performed when the agent is no longer useful to the organisation and those agents who crack under the weight of their sins are just simply not useful. 

She ponders the problem all the way back from Amanda’s office, cutting through the training area to return to her own office space on the opposite side of the complex, but before she gets there, two things get in her way. 

“Hey Nikita, can I speak with you?” A recruit says to her, as she crosses the training room floor. It’s Jaden, the smart-ass recruit that Alex made an enemy of months ago, and Nikita is still the recruits’ first point of call with any issues they might be having.

“What is it, Jaden?’ She asks, but her tone makes it clear that she doesn’t appreciate the interruption. Jaden either doesn’t pick up on the nuance or doesn’t care.

“Somewhere private?” The girl insists, and Nikita is sure to keep her frustration bottled away inside. She nods politely, and with a commanding twitch of her fingers she gestures for the young girl to follow her back to her office.

The room allocated to her is not one that she spends a lot of time in, she’s generally more mobile than either Birkhoff or Amanda and so hasn’t seen fit to personalise the space much. She does have a closet in the corner with a spare change of clothes for pretty much every occasion (it is necessary, in her line of work) but she has no comfortable couches or love-seats, and her desk is utilitarian and clear of clutter. She takes a seat and gestures for Jaden to sit opposite.

“What’s the problem?” She asks, and she watches as Jaden’s eyes sparkle a little-- like she has achieved some sort of personal victory.

“I’ve found a mole in Division.” She says quickly, and Nikita’s heart begins to thump so hard in her chest she feels sure that everyone in the building can hear it.

“What?” She says, letting some irritation colour her tone so it comes off as concern mixed with something akin to anger. 

Jaden leans to the side a little so she can pull something from the pocket of her blue sweatpants, then she places it on the desk between them. It makes a little clink against the clear pyrex surface. Nikita picks it up. It’s the casing from one of their standard issue reading lights, but it has been removed and there is a bit of sticky tape affixed to one side. She reaches over and switches on her own desk lamp to hold the thing up to the light. Sure enough, she sees a fingerprint trapped there. An ingenious little MacGuyvered fingerprint scanner.

“I found it in Alex’s room.” Jaden reveals, and Nikita glances up at the recruit. No wonder that little glint of victory had been there. Those two girls had never gotten along, their personality clashes had been one of her more persistent behaviour management issues over the past year. She should’ve seen this coming. Alex hadn’t hidden her tracks perfectly, and Nikita had told Michael that it was only a matter of time until someone figured it out. Granted, she figured it would be Amanda, but of course Jaden’s paranoia and persistence would come through in the end.

“How long have you had this?” Nikita demands.

“About a week or two.” Jaden says.

“Have you told anyone else about this?” She asks.

And to her great relief, Jaden shakes her head. “I figured you were the only one safe to tell.” She says. “You’re the only one she doesn’t have wrapped around her little fingers.”

Nikita nods slowly, then slips the plastic casing into one of the pockets in her jacket. She stands and circles around the desk, coming to a stop right next to Jaden’s chair. “Thank you for telling me.” She says quietly. “Leave this with me.”

“Are you gonna tell Percy?” Jaden asks looking up, and that sparkle in her eye is back again.

Nikita lashes out, grabbing the girl roughly by the throat, tightly enough to shock the girl out of her revenge fantasy and back into reality, but not so tight that she’ll do any visible damage. “Do not tell _anyone else_ about this.” She commands, “This stays between you and me. Do not snoop into this any more, do not approach Alex, Percy, anyone. And above all, _do not look into this any further_. I’ll do it from now on. Do you understand?”

She shakes the girl a little, and with more than a little fear in her eyes, Jaden nods. “Yes.” She squeaks.

Nikita lets go of her throat and pointedly rests her hand on her hip. “This sort of thing is delicate, and if you’re not careful it could all come back down on you.” She says in a much softer, more calming voice. She points at the door. “Now go back to your room. I don’t want to see you for the rest of the day.” 

To give the girl credit, she does as she’s told without question, and she leaves the room quick smart.

 _Shit_ , she thinks to herself. She securely locks the door to give herself a few moments of privacy to collect her thoughts and to figure out some sort of plan to deal with this without raising any further suspicion. The most obvious answer is to frame Jaden for it all, it wouldn’t be hard from her position, and Birkhoff would help (he’s never liked the girl much) but it would mean killing an innocent girl (albeit a completely irritating one) to protect their lie. And that isn’t why she’s doing this. She’s doing this to protect those who can’t protect themselves, to get revenge for those people that Division has wronged and manipulated and hurt.

So no, she’ll need to figure out some other way to keep Jaden’s discovery from coming to light. Somehow, she’ll have to do it.

Later that afternoon, the second, and more pressing complication blindsides her. One of Birkhoff’s techies finds Alex’s shell program during a routine server clean up and takes it directly to Percy. Birkhoff and Nikita stand over Percy’s shoulder and watch stone-faced as he sends IM after IM through to Michael, who responds almost instantaneously, ignorant of the trap into which he’s falling.

Things just got messy.

… … …


	5. Gonna let it happen

_Looking for Heaven, for the devil in me. Well what the hell, I’m gonna let it happen to me._

… … … 

Since Nikita is the most senior agent assigned to the Zoman mission, she is the one who is given the order, directly from Percy no less.

“We finally have the advantage, NIkita.” He says to her, a zealous happiness reflecting openly in his body language. It chills her to her core. “You’ll have the surprise you need to take him out.” 

“We need to keep it from Alex.” She says immediately and as business-like as possible. “She’s nervous enough about the mission, finding out that Michael knows about the hit will just distract her.”

“You’re in charge of the details,” Percy says with a dismissive wave. “I have complete faith in your abilities. You’ll get him this time.”

She plans it by herself, and though she knows it could be easier if she involved Birkhoff, it’s too dangerous as it is, and the more people who know about this, and Alex, and everything, the more precarious the situation becomes. As she promised Alex, she is there with the support team on the ground that day, and the support team is sworn to complete secrecy about their secondary mission: Find Michael, disable Michael, detain Michael, _Do Not Kill Michael_. She makes it clear that she is the one who will have that honour.

No one questions her on it.

After that it’s a lot harder to plan in detail. If she could get in contact with Michael, to warn him somehow, she would. But they decided it would be too risky to communicate, even with Birkhoff’s help, so she has no way of getting a reliable message through to him. She’ll just have to trust in Michael’s survival skills, and she’s always been good at thinking on the fly.

Hopefully she won’t get them all killed.

… … ...

The Zoman estate sprawls out each way for miles and is crawling with all sorts of heavily-armed security, but Michael slips easily past it all, finding a great little hiding spot on the roof where he can stay until the real action begins later. He watches as Alex totters around the party, ostensibly as one of the assistance helping to keep the wedding party in line, and he easily picks out the Division operatives who’re spread out amongst the catering staff. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why they’ve picked this man for assassination. His arms-dealing business is extremely profitable, and would create an invaluable source of cash-flow for Percy and Division if it were led by someone more amenable to Division’s world-view.

But it doesn’t really matter right now, he’s not looking to prevent this mission from taking place-- He’ll do it himself so Alex doesn’t have to. He’s killed before, for good reasons and not so good reasons. Another death on his conscience won’t make that much of a difference. But putting Alex in this position was never part of his plan. She won’t kill anyone if he has anything to do with it.

Michael checks his watch, it’s almost 5:30, and it’s time for him to move. He stands carefully and lightly makes his way across the roof until he reaches the balcony of the master bedroom. If all is going to plan downstairs, Alex will be guiding the man upstairs where she’ll take him out with a syringe full of poison. He grasps the edge of the roof and rolls over the edge, dangling above the balcony for a few seconds before dropping down and slipping quickly into the room. They’re not here yet, but that’s fine. He goes and stands behind the door where he can easily disable anyone who comes into the room.

He doesn’t have to wait long. Alex steps into the room wearing the fluffy electric blue number that he’s sure Amanda picked out and her bluetooth headset and leads Zoman.

The older man is dressed in an expensive black suit, and asks immediately to see his daughter. Alex begins to make her excuses, and Michael makes his move. He steps up behind the man and wraps a strong arm around his neck, placing forceful pressure onto the blood vessel in the man’s neck for one, two, three seconds then he is out like a light. Alex quickly shuts the door and disables her comm.

“What are you doing here?” She hisses, and gestures to the unconscious man on the ground. “I told you I could do this.”

Michael doesn’t have time to argue the point with her. “You might be able to, but I don’t want you doing that.” He says bluntly and holds his palm flat out. “Give me the poison.”

She glares at him for a second, but dutifully reaches a hand into the folds of her dress and pulls out the syringe. He snatches it and pops the cap off, squirting the tiniest bit of the clear liquid from the tip before leaning down to shove the thing into the man’s neck and end it all right here and now.

But of course it doesn’t go like that. The door opens and someone whispers “Alex,” and Thom, one of the other recruits steps inside. Michael reacts instinctively, whipping up to pull Alex into a choke-hold well before Thom has a chance to pull his gun.

“Drop the weapon.” Michael demands, and tightens his grip around Alex’s throat. “Or I kill her.”

Thom doesn’t lower the gun. “Michael is here.” he says into his comm, and Michael shoves Alex forward the few feet to the doorway. She has no balance in her stiletto heels and crashes into Thom who barely catches her, and Michael uses the opportunity to launch himself back out onto the balcony. This time he vaults over the edge and catches the branch of a nearby tree to shimmy himself down.

A branch next to his head explodes in a flurry of sap and wood chips, and he instinctively flinches away from the volley of bullets that is pointed at him.

 _Fuck_. He thinks to himself and curls up as small as he can near the base of the tree, and waits for a break in the gunfire, for when whoever it is will reload, and then he will just have to make a run for it.

When it comes, he bolts, sprinting as hard and as fast as he’s ever done, as though his life depends on it. His destination is the small pool house behind the back steps, he’ll be cornered but he’ll be away from the main house and he can hopefully draw the operatives away from the crowds and minimise any collateral damage.

It is then that he becomes aware of someone following closely behind him-- he hears the panting of breath, the steady thump of someone running, and _whizz_!-- a bullet flies past his ear. He glances back for a second only and sees Alex in hot pursuit about twenty feet behind him. That’s something at least.

He ducks into the pool house and a couple of seconds later Alex slips inside as well. “They must’ve known you’d be here.” She chokes out immediately, and Michael nods, knowing they probably only have a few minutes to form some sort of plan before the rest of Division will be on him.

“They must’ve found the shell program.” Michael says and runs a hand through his hair. He needs to put that aside for now and _think_. How are they going to get out of this, should he take Alex with him? Is she compromised? _Shit_.

Suddenly there is a loud scuffle just outside the hut, a man grunts, and there is a loud gunshot that reverberates through the room. Both Alex and Michael train their guns on the door, resolutely ready for whatever comes, but both are equally surprised by the voice that calls through.

“Don’t shoot me.” Nikita says, “I’m coming in.”

Michael immediately lowers his gun and immediately opens the door to let the other woman in. Alex, however, keeps her gun raised and the confusion about the situation is writ clear across her face. It only intensifies with Michael pulls Nikita into a tight embrace, and Nikita doesn’t resist in the slightest.

“We have about two minutes,” Nikita says, ignoring the gun pointed at her, addressing Michael solely. “They have evidence against Alex, Michael, she can’t stay in Division.”

Alex sputters, “What?” and it is only then that her pointed gun wavers, it drifts a little to one side.

“They know about the shell program, someone has made an accusation about you to me.” Nikita says bluntly. “You’re not safe there anymore. It’s only a matter of time before they connect the dots.”

Michael nods, “She can come with me then, we’ll overpower you and get out.

“There is a Division surveillance truck about 2 miles through the forest to the west.” Nikita points in the right direction. “Only manned by one at the moment. The tracker is underneath the passenger seat.”

“Right.” Michael nods, and checks the ammo in his gun, and that he still has his spare clips. “Come on Alex, let’s go.” He says.

But Alex doesn’t move. Instead she points the gun at Nikita. “I’m not going. I’m staying in.” She says fiercely, and Michael steps between them and holds up his hands.

“No, Alex. This isn’t the time--”

“There is another way.” Alex insists. “We frame Jaden for it all. I have leverage against her.”

Nikita shakes her head, “It won’t be enough, they won’t believe it of her.”

“I am not just going to step aside like this, I knew what I was getting into when I got myself recruited. I don’t need either of you sheltering me any longer.” Alex says fiercely, gesticulating her point with the barrel of her gun.

Michael wants to scream in frustration, they don’t have _time_ to argue with the teen about this, they are all about to be cornered. He is this close to whacking her over the head with something heavy and blunt just so he can carry the girl out of here (it wouldn’t be the first time he knocked her unconscious, after all) but to his surprise, Nikita nods. “Fine,” She says, “There is one other option. We give them something more important than Alex.”

Michael snaps his head around to look at her.

“We give them me.” She says. “Pin it all on me. The shell program, all the sabotaged missions, everything. Alex, you can be the hero who catches me just as I’ve let him go.”

“ _No_.” Michael says, and it takes almost everything he has not to scream at them both for how _dumb_ they’re being, making these reckless decisions with no regard to their safety. “Nikki, they’ll kill you.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But if it means that one of you kills Percy down the line, well... so be it.”

Alex nods, and it is a reverent nod, almost a promise in the form of a simple gesture. “Go, Michael.” Alex commands. “We can do this. I can help get her out when we’re there. Nikita, there is a way out of Division, a crawlspace in a vent on the recruit level. It leads to a silo you climb up to get out.”

He glares at them both, feeling mutinous at the way they ganged up on him so fast, frustrated that they have him cornered, that they’ve decided how everything will go already, and most of all he feels dread, that he’s sending one or both of them to their deaths. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to live with that on his conscience.

But it’s their decision, and he knows them both well enough to know that now they’ve made their minds up, he won’t be able to change it that easily. At least not with the time he has today.

So he does the one thing he can do. He grabs Nikita by the shoulders and pulls her into a rough kiss, not caring that Alex is there standing behind them and their time is almost up. He focuses all his energy on the kiss, the way his lips smash together with hers, the rough clash of teeth, but also the sweet taste of her breath and the way she kisses him back just as passionately. He feeds everything he can into the kiss, his frustration, his passion, his love, his regrets, everything. It’s been so long since they did this, and he doesn’t have the time to tell her everything he wants and needs to tell her. Most of all he doesn’t want this to be their last time together. But saying all that would take too long; the kiss will have to get the message across instead.

They pull apart, reluctantly, and Michael whispers to her fiercely: “Don’t. Die. Don’t let them get you too. Please. Don’t die.” 

She nods obediently, and then says quietly, gripping his hand tightly in her own. “I don’t want to be safe, remember Michael?” She says and he lets her go. _I want this to end_ he finishes for himself.

He ducks out the door without looking back, but hears the distinct sound of Alex using the butt of her gun to hit Nikita in the jaw.

All he can do now is pray and get himself to that surveillance truck before anyone has a chance to catch him, lest it all come crashing down about their ears.

… … ...

Nikita wakes up in chains, and she knows that their deception must’ve worked.

She is suspended by the arms from the ceiling, with the tips of her toes barely touching the ground, but not enough to take her weight. She blinks her eyes to make them work properly, and recognises Amanda’s torture chamber almost instantly. From the pain in her shoulders she can tell she’s been suspended here for ten minutes at least. She’s still in her clothes from earlier, black pants, sensible runners, and a tailored blazer over the top of a plain black singlet. Factoring in travel time, she’s probably been out for an hour, two at the most.

Amanda herself is standing in front of her, with a curious expression on her face.

“Hi Amanda.” Nikita says, suppressing a groan as she tries to stretch her limbs a little. 

“You know, Nikita,” Amanda begins lightly. “When they told me they’d caught the mole, I knew it was you.”

“Is that so?” Nikita replies, and she shrugs her head to the side. “Well... Good job catching me. Oh. Wait, you didn’t.”

Amanda doesn’t seem affected by Nikita’s careless reply. “Yes,” She says, with a vindictive smile on her face. “A recruit had that honour. Bit of an underwhelming finale for you though, Nikita, being caught by someone who can barely shoot straight.”

“She got lucky, and you got played. Doesn’t matter how you spin it, really.” Nikita says. “We’ll both know the truth.”

Amanda arcs a single eyebrow, but turns her back on Nikita, to her tray of menacing tools of torture, hands hovering over a hammer, some pliers, a thick metal chain, but the heavy iron door at the far end of the room opens before the woman has a chance to choose, and Percy and the young recruit Alex walk into the room.

“I thought we should give Alex the opportunity to really grasp exactly what she’s done for us here today,” Percy says to Amanda, who nods and steps aside.

“Congratulations, Alex. You took down Nikita.” Percy says, “A cancerous blight that will be purged from our system.”

“She’s not so tough.” Alex says lightly, and Nikita doesn’t bother to hold back the laugh that bubbles up from within.

“Oh honey. You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?” She says condescendingly. “Well, take your fifteen minutes of fame and run with them as fast as you can. They won’t do you any good in the real world. You’ll get eaten alive.”

Alex doesn’t drop her gaze. “You’ve always underestimated me.” She says, and Nikita rolls her eyes.

“Fine. Twenty minutes of fame. But it still won’t help you.” Michael at least passed one useful bit of code to his protege before putting her on the inside. She’ll only have to tolerate fifteen to twenty minutes of Percy and Amanda’s interrogation before Alex can organise some sort of distraction. That gives her fifteen or so minutes to figure out how she’ll get out of these chains, then she just has to get to the crawlspace that leads to the silo and she’ll be free. 

“At least I’m not the one hanging in chains right now.”

Or maybe she won’t have to-- Alex doesn’t drop her gaze, but Nikita won’t bank on it. 

Nikita spits at the girl. She misses, for the most part, but she takes great pleasure in seeing a little globule of spittle darken the fabric of Amanda’s skirt. At least she got someone.

“That will be all for now, Alex.” Percy says, eyes darkening, and Amanda selects the cattle prod from her tray of menacing things, and both take a step forward once Alex has shut the door behind her.

“Do you want the honours or shall I?” Amanda asks Percy, holding out the prod to the man.

“Oh no, be my guest.” Percy says, and Amanda wastes no more time. She thrusts the prod into Nikita’s side and it burns and sends a sharp, violent, _painful_ shock right through her body. Nikita gasps a little, but does her best to hold it together. Either way it’ll be over soon, and mind-over-matter is a skill that Amanda of all people taught her. It seems fitting that she use that to her advantage right now.

“So when did he turn you then?” Percy asks. “How long has it been?”

She grits her teeth and forces air through her nose to keep calm. “Not long enough, Percy.” She says, and braces herself for Amanda’s inevitable shock, but it doesn’t come as predicted.

Percy seems to concede that point easily enough. Division’s pragmatism stems from him, after all. “You’re a lot better actress than I gave you credit for.”

“Why thank you, Percy.” She shoots a sarcastic grin in his direction. “Since we’re in a sharing mood, I should probably mention that you should get a better video editor to photoshop your lies. The devil is in the details, Amanda taught me that. Perhaps she can give you some tips.”

Neither of them seems to see the humour. Nikita doesn’t really mind, she shifts a little in her chains, attempting to relieve a little of the pressure from her wrists, but the small hint of relief she gets is snatched away when Amanda buries the prongs of the prod next to her belly button and the charge vibrates painfully through her again, and she arches her back involuntarily and cries out in pain.

“I don’t think she really grasps the gravity of the situation,” Amanda says conversationally, holding the end of the prod close to her face so she can pick at the peeling paint on the side, before letting it drop back at her side.

Nikita rolls her eyes and pants a little. “You’re going to kill me and you’re going to take your time. What more is there to grasp?”

“She still hasn’t answered my question.” Percy notes, and Amanda replaces the prod on her tray, and selects a clean looking syringe and a tiny vial of a clearish liquid. Nikita can’t be sure, but it’s most likely sodium thiopental, the fabled ‘truth serum’. It doesn’t so much compel you to tell the truth, but reduce your brain’s capacity to filter things, so often keeping the truth a secret becomes a lot more difficult. She’s never been under its influence before, so if that’s what it is she’ll have a hard time fighting it.

Of course, it could just be poison. She is making some pretty wild assumptions here.

Amanda prepares the needle with the quick precision of someone who does it often, and Nikita does not waste her energy struggling away from the point when Amanda injects the liquid into her neck. Instead, she focuses on trying to remain as clear-headed as possible, knowing that it will not take long to effect her, whatever the effect will be, and that her only way of really fighting it off is to divert her energy elsewhere.

Sure enough, within a few seconds her eyes become harder to focus, and the strangest taste of garlic fills her mouth. She blinks hard against the sensation and heliotropic spots appear in her vision, but it is the overwhelming feeling of relaxation that is most pressing. It isn’t quite sleepiness, but instead she feels almost giddy with resignation, that whatever comes will come, and she no longer has to stop it. She sags a little into her restraints, but thankfully the pain in her wrists remains, along with the jittery feeling the shocks sent through her. It is something, at least, to focus on, and to use to keep coherency.

“Oh this is the good stuff, Amanda.” She says, a little more slowly than she wanted, but at least her mouth still works. “Thanks.”

Amanda turns away and Percy steps forward.

“How long have you been working with Michael?” Percy asks again, insistent and forceful.

Nikita forces herself to look at him. “A few months, since I tracked him down in Uzbekistan.” She says. “ _Then you will know the truth and truth will set you free_ , Percy. You build a house of lies and it’s bound to come toppling down around you like a house of cards.”

Apparently sodium thiopental makes her speak in idioms and mixed metaphors. That’s something to remember for next time. Next time, heh. Yeah, Nikita, stay positive. That's the spirit.

"What have you told him about Division?" asks Percy.

"The truth." Nikita says, and bites down on her tongue to keep from spilling any more. She takes a deep breath in through the nose, and lets it out slowly, pushing the urge to speak down while she focuses on the distracting pain in her arms. "My arms hurt," She says, when she finally has to let something out. It is a relief it's such a mundane revelation.

The answer doesn't seem to impress Percy much, who turns to Amanda. "I'll leave you two alone. I trust you can get everything we need out of her then get rid of her."

"Of course." Amanda says with a deferential nod, and Percy leaves the two of them alone.

"Girl-talk time then?" Nikita asks, and then she smiles, "Neato."

"You can try to hold out as long as you like Nikita, but it won't work forever and eventually you’ll tell me what I need to know.” Amanda says, casually, then leans forward a little, bridging the gap between them til they are only a few feet apart. “And the sooner I know what I need to know, the sooner all this can be over for you. We can save you from the long, drawn out process that this could be and make this easy. Maybe even pain free.”

It all sounds very convincing, and if Nikita hadn’t worked so closely with the woman for so many years and seen her manipulations up close and worked on others, she may have even believed it. 

“I don’t want to see you hurt any more,” Amanda says, and it is like the straw that breaks the camel’s back. And in her unrestrained, almost carefree state, Nikita laughs.

“You don’t want to see me get hurt, you don’t want to see me suffer?” She says between mighty chuckles. “That’s rich, Amanda. Sadist isn’t a strong enough word for what you are.”

Amanda doesn’t seem phased by the skepticism. “Believe what you want to believe, but of the two of us I am the loyal one and you are the traitor.”

“Traitor to what? A system that has done nothing but manipulate and hurt me? This is just as much a survival thing as it is a revenge thing.”

“So it is about revenge with you then, is it? Revenge over Daniel, I suppose.”

“You killed the man I loved.”

“Really? Are you sure that was love? Because as far as I can see, everything you’ve done for us, and against us, has been all about Michael.”

Nikita narrows her eyes a little. “And what would you know about love, Amanda?” She asks, “You weren’t made that way.”

Amanda inches forward again, but an enormous explosion rocks the room and knocks Amanda off her feet. Nikita feels a shift in her shackles and looks up. The concrete around the fixtures has cracked, and she knows this is her opportunity. She twists her hands to grasp the chain, and then with a grunt she tenses and lifts her legs and jerks as hard as she can. Sure enough, the concrete gives way, and she drops to the ground, chains crashing against the floor with a deafening clang.

She scrambles to her feet and pulls the chains with her. They are heavy, and her arms are tired, but she has enough adrenaline coursing through her now for none of it to matter-- She has a chance to be free, it’s enough. She twists her wrists and twirls the chains into her fists and while Amanda has done the smart thing and run from the room as quick as her heels let her, the two guards that charge her way don’t stand much of a chance. 

She twirls in a circle, dragging the chains with her until they whip around and catch the first guard across the side of the head and he drops to the floor like a stone. The second guard dodges the first attack, but she is lighter and more nimble, and though he throws a solid punch she easily ducks it and knees him in the groin, and when he cowers over to protect the sensitive area from any further abuse, she brings the heavy chains down hard, knocking him out too.

Nikita doesn’t stop to check if they’re alright. One of them will have keys to the manacles around her wrist, and sure enough she finds them buried deep in the pocket of the first guard. Within a few short moments she’s free, and knows she only has a few moments to get out of this place alive and to Alex’s crawl space and freedom. 

She takes a few deep breaths, and uses the time to refocus and plan her escape route. Then she picks up the cattle prod and runs out the front door.

Her way to the elevator is unimpeded, but that doesn’t surprise her much. The level she’s on doesn’t usually have many extraneous personnel hanging about, and she imagines that Amanda has already made her escape to the floors above. Nikita needs to get three floors up before she reaches the recruit level where Alex’s escape route is. She gets into the elevator and presses the button for the top level and punches in her security code, knowing that Percy and co will see her in here and will probably stop the elevator before she has a chance to get to the surface, and sure enough, the elevator comes to a grinding halt on the exact level she’d been aiming for.

The doors open, and everyone in the room turns to stare, recruits, guards, and at the far end of the room behind their tinted glass, Percy, Amanda, and all the rest of the central control unit. Clearly the recruits don’t know how to react, most of them stare at her wide eyed, but there are a cocky few (they most volatile, the ones most prone to overreacting) step towards her.

She doesn’t waste any time, but she doesn’t pull her punches either. These children are dangerous, she trained them that way. But she is worse and she isn’t going to take pity on them. She uses the cattle prod on the first two, leaving them disabled and twitching on the ground, and she tries for the third but he dodges her and snaps it out of her hands. Nikita responds by hitting him sharply in the face with the palm of her hand, crushing the cartilage in his nose, following it with a swift elbow to the solar plexus.

Other recruits have their try at her, but she takes them all out one-by-one, and soon enough a few guards make it into the fray, with their automatic weapons, but because she is surrounded by the recruits, the guards don’t fire at her.

Big mistake.

She takes the two out and acquires herself a gun, spraying the tinted glass of the control room with bullets, one even gets the fuse box for the room, and she takes the opportunity. She springs from the ground and vaults up the stairs and into one of the recruit corridors, and runs head-long into Birkhoff.

“Nikki.” He says, and shoves two things into her hands. One is oddly heavy for its size, the other feels familiar. “Take this and go.”

She looks down. She’s holding one of his signal jammers in her left hand-- it’ll block her tracker long enough for her to get it out. In her right hand is one of the Black Boxes, and there is a yellow post-it affixed to one side.

She opens her mouth to ask, but stops her before she has a chance. “Decrypted just for you. Now knock me out or something, and go.”

There are not enough words to describe her gratitude, to declare everything she feels for this wonderful man, this kind man, this best of friends in the tiny amount of time they’ve been given. So she presses a swift kiss to his cheek, says “Thank you.” with as much feeling as she can pack into those two short little words, and punches him hard in the gut.

He doubles over in pain, but she knows he will appreciate being able to avoid another trip to the dentist. She leaves him there in the corridor, but safely tucks his gifts into her jacket pocket. 

… … …

He hears nothing from anyone for hours. Nothing from Alex, nothing from Birkhoff.

Nothing from Nikita.

He stalks a nervous path from one end of the loft to the other, and runs his hands through his hair so frequently that it’s a miracle he doesn’t end up with a bald patch.

Then he gets a message through the shell program. _N escaped. Don’t use this program ever again - B_.

He breathes a little easier. Then he deletes the Shell program completely from his system. He’ll do a proper wipe of the hard-drive later.

An hour or so later, he gets a call.

“Come get me?” Nikita says, and he’s out the door and heading towards his car before she even has a chance to tell him where to go. He thinks that this lightness in his chest is the closest he’s come to a religious experience.

The first thing she says to him, when he picks her up from the truck stop is: “London.” and then she leans across and gives him a hug.

He frowns taking her in: she looks tired, her eyes are bloodshot and oddly dilated. There are dark bruises blooming across the side of her face and near her collar bone. He’s sure there are more he can’t see, but they don’t seem to be bothering her. In fact, she smiles.

“Rio De Janeiro.” She says, and gives him a kiss to the cheek that lingers.

“Are these where...?” He begins, not daring to hope that she could’ve wheedled that information out of someone before she left, but she nods.

He puts the car into gear, and she slips a hand to his thigh as he pulls out onto the main road. “Melbourne.” She says, and she tilts her head to the side; a little smile pokes at the corner of his lips.

It isn’t until they’ve booked a room at a dodgy looking motel that she slips her hand in his and tells him the next place: “Kuala Lumpur.”

“We’re going to be very well travelled. ” He notes, unable to keep the grin from his face. This is more than he ever could’ve asked for. When she’d taken the hit for Alex he’d assumed that was the last they’d ever see of each other.

“Prague.” She says simply, once he’s unlocked the door.

He drops his duffel bag on the only bed and turns to her. “So we know where they all are? All the black boxes?” 

“What? No.” Nikita says, and her face is so shocked, and so genuine that Michael starts backtracking in his mind, tracing the assumption back, stammering a quick apology.

But then Nikita’s face splits into the widest grin he’s ever seen. “These are the places you’re taking me on holiday. I deserve it.” And she pulls a black box from her back pocket. “Fully decrypted. Courtesy of Birkhoff.” She says, and flips the box over to reveal a post-it stuck to the side, written in Birkhoff’s chicken-scratch scrawl: London, Rio, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, NJ, Prague.

… … …

There is one last thing to do.

“This is the last time I’ll hurt you,” Michael says, promise gleaming in his eyes, light glinting off the scalpel in his hand.

“I trust you.” She says and leans back into the pillows. He is as fast as he said, and it doesn’t hurt as much as she expects it to. Maybe that’s a sign that she’s become desensitised, after all the abuse she’s been through the past few years. Or maybe it’s just a sign that Michael is a better surgeon than he thinks.

She hears a little tinkle of metal hitting glass, and knows it’s almost over. He just has to patch her up, and then her connection to Division will be gone forever.

“This’ll sting a little,” He warns, setting down the scalpel and picking up the little tube of medical glue and a wad of gauze.

If anything, the sharp stinging pain is worse than the surgery, but it's still nothing she can't handle, and before she knows it he's efficiently taping a small bandage back over the wound and cleaning up everything he used.

Nikita reaches out and slips her hand underneath the hem of his shirt, her fingers finding his scar easily. He collects the scalpel and other utensils together in the towel that he'd slipped a little underneath her to protect the bedsheets from the blood, and tosses the soaked gauze pads and the little bloody silver tracker into the rubbish.

"We'll match." She says with a small smile, and he covers her hand with his own.

He arches an eyebrow and looks down at her. "We could just get matching tattoos, like any normal couple."

She laughs, and it is a joyful, soft laugh. She twists her wrist and hooks her fingers into the waistband of his pants and tugs him sharply forward. He over-balances and she twists out from under him, using his momentum to flip them over. He doesn't resist, and she straddles his hips and leans over him. "Normal couple?" She asks.

"Well, as normal as we want to be." Michael and leans up, sliding a hand around the back of her neck, pulling her gently closer.

"I don't want to be normal." She says quietly, and presses herself further against him. She whispers into his ear: "I just want you."

Then she kisses him, and it is such a relief, and such an amazing feeling, to know that she is free and here, and that no matter what happens now, he'll be here, and she'll be with him. She's spent so many years feeling lost, and directionless, but now she knows the way, and it is a path she'll walk with Michael. Together they will find the black boxes, and they will destroy them. Together they will take down Division. Together they will right the wrongs and bring justice to those who deserve it.

Together they can bring down Division, with Alex and Birkhoff on their side.

Together.

 

… … …

_Authors Note: Annnd we’re done :) I couldn’t’ve done this without the encouragement and beta skills of my two ladies J & R, and thank you so much to everyone who’s read along and left all the lovely comments: onelonemockingjay, pickapart, heywilma, sokiew, Wootar16, stardustshop, nikita4everr, Miami Blackheart, ayesha-s, ArtElf, Jossiegirl, Tigerlily02, tizahrae and meee18. _

_A significant amount of credit should go to the 90s action soundtracks, Placebo and Florence + the Machine that helped me get into the right mood to write all this. I do have a few other plot bunnies hopping around, but I’m about to start a prac placement that’ll go for the next 7 weeks and I don’t think I’ll have a lot of time for recreational writing. We’ll see how it goes! I do like to procrastiwrite._

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter title is taken from the Bruce Springsteen song 'The Wrestler'


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